[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Good morning. For those of you who might be new, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead ministers here. Welcome to the Oceanside Sanctuary. I really love that Janelle shared about the hands off rally yesterday here in downtown Oceanside. I just want to just quickly mention that again, Janelle already said this, but I went yesterday. She wasn't able to go. I went, toured around, had a great time. It was very interesting, very, very energetic, very encouraging. Right. Which, I mean, I don't know how many times you felt encouraged in the last three months, but that was nice.
And I was really stunned to discover afterwards that like Janelle said of the 20, I believe it's 20 volunteers who organized yesterday's rally in Oceanside, which had about a thousand people, that of the 20 volunteers, like 18 of them were from this church. And so here.
So here's the thing, like, I'm the one of the pastors here. I get to brag about that, right? But I will say here's something that was super cool about that, is it wasn't an Oceanside sanctuary event, right? Like, everybody wasn't wearing Oceanside Sanctuary T shirts. It wasn't an opportunity to, like, market the Oceanside sanctuary. There weren't, like, featured speakers. There was no one person who was sort of lifted up as, like, you know, the person in charge. It was a genuinely grassroots event, and that was amazing. And I didn't know that before going yesterday. And, you know, partly that's because I'm just oblivious. I don't know anything that goes on around here, Joey. And that hurt a little, in the best way.
But one of the things I saw that was really impressive to me is I saw three women who are members of this church who were organizers, volunteers at that event. I saw those three women put their bodies between peaceful protesters and antagonists who were trying to make things more difficult. Now, I won't name those three women because two of them are here right now. And I wouldn't want to embarrass you, but that was incredibly impressive to me that they so skillfully, so courageously, so persistently simply put their bodies between protesters who were doing what they were doing joyfully Even. Right. And people who were trying to antagonize and disrupt.
And that is. Yeah, yeah. So to me, that's. That is what spiritual formation is about, right? That is what spiritual health and growth and spiritual fitness are about. It is the ability to not only recognize what's right, to discern what is right, but be able to make a decision, to take an action, to put yourself in a position that's difficult, that's scary, and maybe even put yourself in harm's way in order to protect others. That's the purpose of spirituality. Now, I don't know what you were taught the purpose of spirituality is. Maybe you were taught that it was to believe a certain checklist of things so that you ended up in the right metaphysical place after you die. But I'm just here to tell you that it is my opinion. Is my opinion that the purpose of spirituality is to make you and I into people of courage and character and wisdom and discernment so that we can stand for what's right.
That is a kind of strength. It's a kind of fitness.
And in that way, that is what spirituality is. It's a kind of fitness program.
Right. Which explains why so many of you show up every January after you've made your, like, you know, resolutions.
You're showing up at the gym more often, you're showing up at church more often. And by the time we get to Easter, not so much.
Right.
I think somewhere we all recognize that by showing up in communities of faith, by learning to do the things that faith teaches us to do, that it is making us into the kinds of people that God intends us to be. And so, for me, I think an interesting question is, as a church like ours, who believes that government should not be cutting off access to food for the poorest members of our society, who believe that government should not be erasing the history, for example, of slavery or bigotry in this country, country, as a church that believes that government ought to be protecting the rights of people like women and queer folks to be able to live good and thriving lives and not take away their rights. That means that occasionally we are going to be called upon to stand in those situations. And this, as Janelle, I think very eloquently said, is not about being a Republican or Democrat or a conservative or a liberal. It's about discerning what's right and what's wrong.
And this morning when I woke up to the news from the Washington Post that the National Park Service has erased significant portions of the story of slavery in our country from their website, I recognize that as wrong.
And so that means even though, you know, we are not advocating for people to be Republicans or Democrats, that we are advocating for a truthful telling of our history in this country. And I think it takes spiritual strength to do that.
I hope that makes sense, because that's my introduction and I gotta move on. So what we're doing today is we're launching a new series. So we just finished a teaching series on prophetic imagination. We learned a lot about, I think, from scripture, what it means to have an imagination for a better world, a better future.
What we wanted to do now is sort of dial back to a more sort of granular, like, you know, practical level and ask what kinds of spiritual practices does it take for us to become those kinds of people? This is something that Janelle really developed because she's had a number of people come to her recently and say, hey, you know, I left behind a particular kind of religion, a particular kind of faith, right? Like, fill in the blank. Like, one of the things you'll discover if you hang out here long enough is you're going to run into a bunch of people who have left a certain kind of faith behind.
For some of you, maybe like myself or like Janelle, you left behind a kind of fundamentalist evangelicalism. You've left that behind, and now you don't quite know what to do with your spirituality. What does it mean for you to be a Christian every single day? Does it mean you got to get up every single day and read your Bible and, like, journal about it or fill in the blanks on a worksheet? Maybe, maybe not.
Others have left behind a kind of Catholicism that told them that who they were and the body that they occupied wasn't good enough for others. They left behind a kind of mainline Christianity that talked about justice but didn't really do anything about it because they're too busy, like, trying to appease the people with power.
We've, many of us have left something behind.
And in leaving that behind and leaving behind a tradition that we were raised in, we sometimes don't quite know what to do with the practices that we were taught. And so we wanted to sort of circle back around in this next series and visit some of those practices.
So I want to read to you Matthew, chapter 6, verses 16 through 18. I'm the first one teaching in this series. There are a bunch of us who are going to be teaching over the next eight weeks on this series. And somehow I drew the short straw and I got fasting so that's what we're talking about today.
We're talking about fasting. I want to read to you this passage From Matthew, chapter 6, verses 6 through 18, and then ask you to pray with me. And then I'm going to share some of what I'm noticing about these words.
Excuse me. Actually, we're going to pick it up in verse 16.
There we go. I think I just misquoted that reference. Matthew, chapter 6, verse 16. And whenever you fast, do not look dismal like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly, I tell you that they have received their reward.
Now, I want to leave it at that, but just point out that there are already, just in this very short one sentence passage, a couple of interesting things going on. Number one, Jesus is taking teaching that fasting is a thing. Number two, he's teaching that there's something problematic about fasting that we have to be careful of. And number three, he is teaching something about what we get out of it, what's our reward when we fast. So I'm going to do my best to unpack all three of those things before we're done today. But I want to ask that you just say a brief prayer with me. God, we thank you for today and for this opportunity for us to gather.
We ask that as we read through these passages, that as we search our own hearts in the light of these words, that you would illuminate something about ourselves that is helpful, that's useful, that's revelatory, that leads us to become the kind of people that you have created us to be. And God, it's our prayer that we become those people, not just individually, but collectively, that we become a people who can repair what's wrong in this world, and that we have the stamina to do so. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
So as good as yesterday was, as rewarding as it was, as exciting, as encouraging as it was, I want to also just point out that it didn't fix anything, that there's a long road ahead.
And one of the reasons I think this series could be helpful to us is just like any sort of program of fitness, what we get from that is stamina, the ability to keep going, to keep pressing in. And so I want to share with you just some of what I know about fasting and some of what I think Jesus is getting at here. First of all, fasting seems a little odd to us. What is fasting? It is of course, abstaining from food for spiritual purposes, Right. In other words, you choose not to eat for a particular period of time. And you do it not because you're practicing intermittent fasting, which apparently is a thing I definitely wouldn't know.
And you do that maybe to like, you know, get healthier or to lose weight. Those are good things. If you're getting healthier, that's definitely a good thing. If you want to lose weight. If, you know, losing weight maybe is advisable by your doctor or something, I suppose that's a good thing too.
But that's not what spiritual fasting is. Spiritual fasting is not about a health benefit, even though there might be one. We know that when people who practice fasting on a fairly regular basis, something odd happens biologically in our bodies and we actually live longer when we experience short periods of starvation. I don't know why that is, but that's not what this is about, right? The purpose of fasting is to abstain from food for spiritual purposes, for a spiritual reason. And this shouldn't surprise us. Every major religion on the planet practices fasting. It's a little bit like saying all newspapers, print on paper. That used to be the case.
Right? There's a kind of modality at work in every religion, and for some reason, every religion tends to contain the practice of fasting. Right now, Muslims are in the midst of Ramadan and will be breaking their fast with Eid. Jews will be celebrating fasting on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur in their tradition. And of course, as Christians, we are in the midst of Lent. Lent is a period of intentional fasting as we lead up to Easter and prepare our hearts for Easter. And so this is a very common thing for people to do in religious history. And Jesus, of course, clearly in this passage, teaches fasting. But we also see Jesus practicing fasting before his ministry, before the beginning of his public ministry. He went into the wilderness. He fasted for 40 days. This seemed to be a common practice in ancient Judaism. We see it in the Hebrew scriptures as well.
And so we know that this is sort of a regular thing for them. We also know from Matthew chapter six, Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, which is what we're reading from here, that Jesus directs us to fasting as one of sort of three foundational spiritual practices. And we'll be talking about all three of these over this eight week period. But those three foundational practices are prayer, giving and fasting.
So I'm not going to sneak in a Sermon on giving and ask you for money. Don't worry, that's in two weeks, and that'll be Easter. So I'll like, hide the sermon on giving in an Easter message. So don't worry.
But these are sort of Jesus foundational religious practices. He seems to embrace these three pillars of spiritual practice from Judaism and says that these things, these practices, including fasting, are key for our spiritual growth, our spiritual strength.
And this, I think, is pretty significant that Jesus taught fasting.
That Jesus taught people to, like, intentionally not eat.
I mean, that might seem unpleasant to you to skip a meal, or maybe you're the kind of person like me who often forgets to eat because you get obsessed about something, right?
But in Jesus time, like, hunger was an imminent threat.
Hunger was a real, everyday existential problem. In the midst of a world where people were dying of hunger regularly, religious communities practiced fasting.
They intentionally chose not to eat, even though starvation was a regular and pervasive threat.
So Jesus says when you fast, he doesn't say if you fast. He says when you fast.
Assuming that there is something powerful about fasting, he says, don't do it like the hypocrites. And so here's where fasting becomes a problem.
He says, whenever you fast, do not look dismal. Now, it's understandable to look dismal if you're not eating right. I get hangry. I'm sure you do too.
When you fast, don't look dismal like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others their fasting. Now, the context of this, of course, is that in Jesus's time, the religious elites, the leaders, would make a big deal about the fact that they were engaging in fasting or prayer or giving. This is his whole point. He says, these are good things to do. You should do them. You should fast. But don't be like those hypocrites who when they fast, they go out onto a street corner. They make it clear to everybody that they're fasting. He says what they want from their fasting is to be admired by you.
What they want is for you to look at them and be like, wow, what an amazing spiritual religious leader this person is actually doing without food because they're so incredibly spiritual.
Jesus says that's not the point of fasting at all. The point of fasting is not so that others will admire you. The point of fasting is not to establish your religious status. He said, if that's what you want out of your religious Practice, that's what you get.
I think that's just a really fascinating way to say it.
Whatever it is that you want out of your religious performance, that's what you get.
If you want people to admire you, guess what, they will.
And then he says, but that's all they get.
In other words, Jesus is saying not only are they practicing fasting poorly, but they're. They're settling for way too little.
There's another reward, there's another benefit to fasting that they should be getting, but they're not getting it because they're too busy trying to impress other people.
Now, this is sort of within the context of a bigger teaching that Jesus offers in Matthew 5 and 6 and 7.
And about a year ago, we taught on this whole series, right? Matthew 5 and 6 and 7, Sermon on the Mount. If you weren't around back then, I don't usually do this, but it would be a good idea if you want to know, sort of like what my perspective is on the Sermon on the Mount. Because it might be like the straw that breaks the camel's back here for you, right? If you wanted to know, you could go back and just listen to those teachings. We called it the Spiritual life of Jesus.
But for now, what I want to point out is that the general purpose of Jesus's spiritual practices is for us to become good, strong, spiritually capable people.
What I mean by that is this. We can't possibly become people who can take care of this world. We can't possibly become people who can repair what's broken with this world. We can't possibly ever become people that are any good to this world if we aren't first people who can take care of ourselves.
We can't possibly repair what's broken in Oceanside or California or the United States of America if we can't even take care of our own issues. This is like a real, like, you know, put the mask on yourself before you put it on the kid in the airplane situation.
Spirituality is about becoming genuinely useful to the problems that exist in our world. And so the purpose of fasting, I'm going to suggest to you, is to learn self control.
That's what fasting teaches you.
Fasting teaches you that whatever you might think about the fascist dictator who currently occupies the White House.
I'm sorry.
I'm not sorry.
Whatever you think about the fascist dictator who currently occupies the White House, you may or may not know that there is a fascist dictator inside of you.
There is a powerful, strong set of broken and corrupt desires inside of you that pushes you and compels you to act in all kinds of ways that are detrimental not just to the world, but to yourself.
The Bible symbolically refers to that fascist dictator inside of you in a lot of different ways. But one of the most common ways the Bible refers to that little lizard brain inside of you is as your stomach in Philippians. The author of Philippians says the world is falling apart because the people who are in charge are people who only obey their stomachs.
It doesn't literally mean your stomach, although it kind of does. Right?
It figuratively refers to those hungers, those desires in us that we just don't know how to control.
Fasting teaches us to say no to that.
Because what fasting does is it asks you to learn how to say no to your literal stomach. And here's the thing about saying no to your literal stomach is you have to eat to survive.
Like, you literally need to eat. Food is good. I mean, let's just assume that you're actually eating food.
Like, much of what we eat isn't. Food doesn't qualify as food.
But we'll just assume for the sake of argument, that we're all eating food. You desperately need food to survive. You can't live for more than about 40 days without food.
So when fasting tells us, instructs us, guides us to abstain from eating food, it's not asking us to give up something bad.
It's not asking us to give up a sin. Fasting is asking us to give up something that is literally a source of survival.
And if you can do that, if you can say no to the nourishment that keeps your body alive, then you can learn to say no to anything.
I know that sounds a little crazy, right? Like, we live in a world where, like today, this morning, before I came down here to teach and had six cups of coffee, I was a little bit hungry, too. And I went, you know, and got like, a little thing of like, peanut butter crackers. Again, not food.
It's not food. I don't know what it is. It's delicious.
My daily allowance of, like, sodium is like 1500 milligrams a day, and there were like 2800 milligrams of sodium in this tiny little thing of peanut butter crackers. It was amazing. It's the best breakfast I've had in a long time.
I couldn't say no to it.
And this is how most of us live day to day.
We don't know how to say no to ourselves. We don't know how to say no to our cravings. We don't know how to say no to an opportunity for a little bit more comfort. We don't know how to say no to to our desires, no matter how much those desires might be killing us.
No judgment. This is just what it's like to be human.
This is not a you problem. This is a we problem. This is a human problem.
Which is why fasting is so incredibly effective, because it teaches you to say no to something that you actually need. If you can say no to food, if you can literally learn on a regular basis to say no to food to yourself, and to actually find a sense of sustenance in your spiritual connection to God, then you can say no to Donald Trump. You can say no to Joe Biden, you can say no to everybody. Can say no to Jason Coker. But you know, you get where I'm going with this, right?
You can say no to your own desire to engage in actions and activities that are just killing you, killing your relationships, killing your career, killing your neighborhood, killing your family.
And you need to be able to do that.
It's entirely possible that there is literally nothing more important right now for Gen Z young adults than learning the ability to say no to their own desires.
Because they've been raised in a world where every single desire is immediately available to them, but they don't have to say no to anything.
And that's profoundly bad for them.
It's profoundly bad for you.
I see you doom scrolling at 11:30 at night, not able to get to sleep because the light from this magical little device is like, you know, lulling you into that liminal space where you're both incredibly exhausted but also unable to sleep. I see you, because that's me too.
It's not just our stomachs we can't say no to.
And this, I think, reveals something true about what it means to be human, right? What it means is that most of the things in our lives, starting with food, make really good servants and really terrible masters.
Do you hear what I'm saying?
Most things in our lives make really good servants and really terrible masters, and not because they're bad.
Food is good in the right proportions.
In fact, pretty much everything is good or bad depending on the proportion.
Every medication that you take that saves your life is just a poison in different quantities.
And so what fasting is, is learning how to be the master, your own life, the master of your own health, the master of your own strength and thriving and discernment and spirituality.
And so when I say literally everything can kill you in the wrong quantities. When I say literally everything can be good or bad. Everything can be a good servant, but a terrible master, I mean everything, maybe especially religion, your faith is a very, very good servant and a really terrible master.
Religious fundamentalism is nothing but spirituality weaponized against.
So many people right now are fasting from religion because they needed to be liberated from spirituality as a weapon in their lives.
So my point here, of course, is you can fast from anything, not just food. I know it sounds a little bit weird to, like, abstain from food intentionally for any period of time. So when I say to you today that fasting is one of the most important, most foundational and most powerful, powerful spiritual practices you can engage in, I do mean food, maybe first and foremost, because, again, it's the thing that you really need.
But I also mean everything else. And maybe for you, there are other things that you need to learn to be in control of that you need to learn to be liberated from, because they're controlling you. I don't know what that is for you.
And I'm not going to ask you to get into little groups and tell each other.
I mean, you can do that later if you want to, but we'll talk about confession at the end of the series.
You're like, oh, when is that? Because I'm not coming.
You really can use this in a very powerful way to learn to be spiritually stronger.
So food is the foundational thing to fast from. But you could fast from coffee, never mind. You could fast from.
You could fast from social media.
You could fast from news.
You could fast from Netflix.
You could fast from severance.
I mean, you sort of have to fast from severance for a couple years at a time, right?
You could fast from certain relationships.
You probably should fast from certain relationships.
You could fast from toxic and abusive theologies that have traumatized you and taught you that you aren't genuinely good.
You could fast from being a part of a religious tradition that tells you that. That you're not enough. Yesterday at the rally, I met a woman. She pulled me aside.
Not to freak anybody out, but I was wearing a collar, like a clergy collar. You know, some of you have never seen me wear a clergy collar. I never wear it at church. I do wear it at things like that, right? Because I want people to be like, what's a Christian doing here anyway? So, right. So anyway, this old woman pulled me aside. She said, are you a priest? And I was like, well, my tradition, we don't call it a Priest. You know, I'm married and my wife's a pastor, and she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, but, like, you're, you know, a clergy person. And I was like, yeah. And then she proceeded to tell me she's 84 years old, raised Episcopalian, raised in the Midwest, been living in California for, like, I don't know, 40 years now or something like that. She told me, I'm 84 years old. I've decided that I can no longer identify as Christian.
I said, well, why not?
I mean, I know the answer, but I said, why not?
She said, because Christianity has just become a political tool to wield against women and people of color and queer folks, and I can no longer in good conscience be a part of that.
But she still goes to her Episcopal church every Sunday, which I love.
Right. It's All Saints Episcopal over in Vista. You should check them out sometime. Very nice people.
She just can't identify with the label anymore.
So I said, so what are you? She said, I'm a New Testament Trinitarian.
I was like, put that on a T shirt.
You get what I'm saying?
She's still a follower of Jesus. She still believes deeply and dearly in God.
She still is fellowshipping with people that she cares for and loves. But if you called her a Christian, she might, like, spit at you.
She's wearing a scarf of the flag of the United States of America because she also still considers herself American and patriotic, even though she can't stand what that flag has come to represent.
So, you know, in her own way, she's sort of fasting from being a Christian.
All right, a couple of tips if you want to practice fasting. Here's what I suggest. Number one, learn from Lent.
This is the kind of church where we don't necessarily make a big deal out of Lent, but we learn something, I think helpful from Lent. Number one, ask yourself what desires have become your fascist dictator right now? Here's a tip. Ask yourself if that thing is good or bad. If that thing is bad, you don't need to fast from it. You just need to quit.
But if it's something that's good, it's something that's good for you. It's helpful for you. It can be healthy for you. You've just become its slave.
Then it's good to give it up. Number two, give your fasting a kind of structure. Lent is for 40 days. Throughout scripture, you'll see people fasting for three days, for seven days, for 40 days. It's helpful to have a Beginning and an end. Give it a structure. Give your giving up of this thing, whatever it is, a particular timeframe? Number three, give it a theme.
Are you fasting in order to repent of that thing that has become a master in your life? Are you fasting because you need to learn how to forgive somebody in your life that has done you wrong? And in order to find somebody space, you need to distance yourself from them for a period of time so that you can gain some perspective, maybe some grace in order to learn how to forgive. Or this is the advanced version of that be forgiven.
Is it discernment? You need to learn how to make a decision. Are you not quite sure what to do about a puzzle in your life? So you need to distance yourself from that situation in order to gain some perspect perspective.
Is feasting your theme?
I love an old sort of like spiritual disciplines writer from back in the like 80s used to like to say that fasting is feasting.
It's feasting on the presence of God.
Are you the kind of person who has a sense of connection with the God who is present in all things in your life? And fasting from food allows you to amplify your sense of that connection.
Give it a theme though. What is it that you're trying to accomplish? Number four. Replace the thing that you're fasting from with something else.
When you're not eating, it's really hard not to think about food.
Really, really hard.
But have you noticed that, like when you're working really hard on something like a project that you're totally immersed in that you're excited about, next thing you know you've skipped three meals.
You're like snapping at your spouse because it's really easy not to eat when you're focused on something else.
So while you're fasting from thing A, give yourself something to focus on. That's good. Number five. Cultivate self awareness while you're fasting, while you're giving up food, while you're giving up your identity as a Christian, if you are like Betty yesterday at the rally, while you're giving up this practice that has become a master in your life, what are you experiencing?
What's your body telling you?
What thoughts keep popping into your head obsessively. What are you noticing about how separating from this thing is affecting you? Number six, process that, Journal it, write about it, talk about it. Number seven, this is really the important one. Break your fast with celebration.
Celebrate when you're done. Now if you're fasting by yourself, don't like invite everybody to a party where you're like, I finished fasting. That sort of breaks Jesus commandment. Right?
And they're like, wow, I'm so impressed. Right. But if you're doing it for yourself, then, you know, have a little party with yourself, celebrate what you've accomplished. If you're fasting like Lent with other people, break Lent with a paschal feast.
Right, Right. Fish tacos. Absolutely.
The point is, don't make it performative, but learn how to break that period of separation with a kind of coming back together.
I know that this is unusual, that in our time that we don't tend to take our spirituality, especially in Christianity, seriously enough to actually practice, but if you were serious about anything in your life, you'd practice it. If you were serious about your fitness or your diet or your vocation or your art, you would work at it.
The whole point of this series is to ask ourselves, after separating ourselves from a version of Christianity that is harmful and toxic and abusive, is there space for a Christianity that includes the kinds of practices that continue to build us up?
And I think there is. Amen. Would you pray with me? God, we thank you again for today. We thank you for this opportunity for us to gather.
We pray that you would expand our imagination for what it means to practice our faith in ways that strengthen us and grow us, develop us into the kinds of people who can stand for what's right and persevere in that work.
We pray all that in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
