Wake Up!

Luke 5:33-39.  Ash Wednesday.

            Jesus contrasts his new way with the old way the disciples are used to.  He readily admits that people say the old way is better.  This is especially true about wine.  “No one who drinks well-aged wine wants new wine, but says, ‘The well-aged wine is better.’”

            The old way was about fasting, which is something the disciples of both John and the Pharisees did, for spiritual reasons.  Fasting was a sign of penitence.

            But Jesus says his disciples don’t fast, at least not while he is with them.  When he is taken away, then they will fast.

            Just about every great spiritual leader has recommended fasting as a beneficial spiritual discipline.  That includes the Protestant Reformers who founded the traditions we carry today.  They must have understood Jesus to have been “taken away.”  His resurrection and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost must not have remedied his having been taken away.

            Jesus questioners here notice that Jesus’ disciples are “always eating and drinking.”  Life with Jesus appears to have been one long party.  The disciples enjoy life; they do not fall into the morose and self-punishing practices that the establishment and the traditionalists maintain.  It is a common criticism, or at least observation, about Jesus.  His enemies call him a glutton and a drunkard.

            Yet the church has always advised fasting.  Jesus himself fasted, of course, for 40 days in the desert, and presumably at Yom Kippur each year.

            Jesus says that it doesn’t work to take the new wine of his celebratory spirituality and try to make the wineskins of the old institution hold it.  Because the new wine is still fermenting, still changing, still expanding, and will cause the old containers to burst.  He uses the example of new and old cloth to make the same point.  The new cloth is unshrunk, and if you sew it to an old garment it will, when washed, shrink and tear free, making a worse hole than the one you were trying to fix.  New cloth is not done, it is subject to change.

            Jesus’ movement was too full of energy, too transformative, too explosive, too wild to be contained by rigid and limited religious institutions.  It would be like having a dance party in a museum: some ancient artifact will get broken.  The curators and custodians will get angry; the trustees will not be amused.

            Jesus’ movement doesn’t have any curators, custodians, or trustees.  It is undomesticated and uncontrolled.  There is no hierarchy, and it is most assuredly not about maintaining or preserving anything.  It’s not an exhibit in glass cases of dead things.  And it is not contained by any rules or regulations. 

            Jesus’ movement is not artificial but authentic, it is not abstract but direct, it is not theoretical but actual, and it is not about living disconnected in the past or the future but in the present moment.  “Now is the right time; now is the day of salvation,” says Paul.  We live between memory and hope, and both serve to feed our acting in the present as witnesses of God’s untamable love, revealed in Jesus Christ.

            So he says that when we’re with the bridegroom, when we’re present with Christ, when we’re tracking with and in him, then there is no need to fast.  Fasting would be a downer; it would drain the juice from the experience; it would snuff the light and suck the energy out of everything.

            But.  Few if any of us can live like that.  Even the greatest of saints did not always sustain that level of presence with the Lord.  Most of us don’t finally dwell completely and perfectly one with Christ while we’re still in time and space.  No matter how spectacular our experience of the risen Lord may be, all of us fall back to sleep.  We become beclouded with blindness again.  We lose the connection.  The bridegroom is taken away.

            And we fast to reestablish the connection.  Because most of the time when we sense the bridegroom having been taken away it is because we have lost our focus and fallen into distraction.  We inevitably become overwhelmed by the day-to-day blizzard of responsibilities, images, fears, memories, desires, calculations, and other things demanding our full attention.  And we lose our attention on the truth.  We fall back into the sleep-walking existence that characterizes normalcy for us.  We sink back into unconsciousness, non-presence.

            It is then that we fast.  We fast to wake back up.  We fast because it gets our attention again on our bodies, which is the most effective way to become present again. 

            Did you ever have a dream in which you know you are dreaming and you fervently desire to wake up?  If you’re like me you’ve learned that the best way to do this is to do something physical in the dream: pinch yourself, hit yourself, regulate your breathing, run into something.

            Fasting gets you back into your body where you can again experience the presence of the Lord Jesus.  Which is why we do it in Lent.  We have 40 days in which to wake ourselves up by getting back in touch with our bodies so we can more fully experience what we will be commemorating, enacting, and celebrating in Holy Week and Resurrection.

            The idea is that if we have sunk into conventional, domesticated, comfortable, risk-free, boring, predictable, sleepwalking religion, it is because the Bridegroom has been taken away.  We need to shock ourselves into awareness of Christ’s presence with and within us.  We need to get back into our bodies and wake up!

            What does Jesus advise?  Stay awake!  Remain alert!  Keep your lamps full of oil and ready!

            Maybe this Lent we can use this time to exert ourselves into a vibrant, connected, sharp, clear wakefulness, so that when we get to the Day of Resurrection we will see clearer than ever the life of God pored  fr he lfe f he wrld.

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