Hey everybody, sorry this is a couple days late but I wanted to share with you what I shared with my congregation on Wednesday.
One of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned in life came from my high school youth pastor. I can’t remember the context or the setting but I remember that one day he explained to us that we had never and probably would never experience hunger.
Now I was a growing teenage boy who was skinnier than your average stick and who ran Cross Country and Track. I lived my life under a constant state of hunger and so I immediately begged to disagree.
But then he explained to us the process of fasting. When one fasts food entirely they go through various stages of discomfort but none of that discomfort is truly “hunger.”
The first stage starts around 10am the morning the fast began. If you awaken and don’t eat breakfast at your usual time, your stomach eventually figures it out. After waiting a couple hours it sends signals to your brain that get translated not as pain but as “indigestion” or a small discomfort sometimes signaled by stomach groans. It does this for a couple reasons. First, at this point your stomach only has acid in it because a well regulated body knows when to expect food and dumps a bit more digestive acid into your stomach to prepare. If this acid has nothing to digest it makes you feel uncomfortable. Second, your body is expecting sugar to dump into your blood stream. If it doesn’t have the usual dose of it, it sends a very early warning signal to your brain. People call that warning signal, “hunger” but it is not.
Shortly after this early warning sign, some people might start shaking. The shakes occur because your blood stream does not have the sugars it expected and didn’t yet know it was supposed to break into your fat reserves to find it. At this point many people will add an adjective to their hunger and say, “I am so hungry” and the more dramatic will say, “I am starving.” Yet at this point they are neither hungry nor starving, just a bit shaky while your body breaks down the fat and dumps its sugar into your blood stream.
In fact, the third thing that happens is your body eventually figures out you are not going to feed it and it begins to break into your fat reserves to find the necessary sugars it needs to continue your daily activities. At this point your stomach stops growling, the shaking stops and suddenly you completely forget that you are fasting.
Day two works much like day one. Around breakfast, lunch and dinner you feel a little bit uncomfortable. You get episodes of shakiness that soon resolve themselves and then your body finds the necessary sugars in your fat stores to keep going.
By day 7 of the fast, most bodies have recalibrated themselves and the person fasting reaches a new equilibrium where they do not feel hungry or shaky at all. This equilibrium can last for quite some time, depending on how much fat you have stored in your body. Most people can survive and feel just fine for 30-40 days.
When the fat stores are gone is when true hunger begins. Like most of you I have never felt this sensation but from what I understand it is debilitating and painful. True hunger begins when your body does not have the nutrients or the calories it needs to sustain your lifestyle. It begins by shutting your body down for longer periods of time. You sleep for 12 hours a day and take long naps. It gets worse when your body begins to eat your muscles to find the fat stores. As it digs into your muscles, you experience awful spasms accompanied by jolts of pain every time you move. If you can manage to move, you become dizzy and disoriented. At this time, your nails become brittle and begin to break off of your fingers. The same goes for your toes.
After your body is done eating your muscles, it starts in on your organs and bones, causing massive and extreme internal pain. Eventually one of those organs will fail resulting in death by starvation.
When you hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” that is the type of pain, discomfort, fatigue and longing for calories that he describes.
Jesus is not saying, “Blessed are those who get a little bit uncomfortable with the sin in their lives and the evil in the world.”
Jesus is not saying, “Blessed are those who get a little bit sad because someone said something mean.”
And he is not saying, “Blessed are those who are saddened by the amount of unsaved people or who feel just a little bit guilty about the sinfulness in their own lives.”
He is saying, “Blessed those who long so much for righteousness, who long so much for the world to become a better place, who want the sin and the evil in the world to go away that they hurt and they ache and they get dizzy over it.”
I am not advocating anorexia today and I am not advocating a type of “spiritual anorexia” where Christians remain in a constant state of bawling, crying and feeling guilty all the time.
But I am trying to remind you that unrighteousness and evil is a big deal. The things we do that hurt others, or hurt our planet or violate the ethos of a loving God are severe. The things that go wrong are worth hurting over and crying over and groaning those groans too deep for words.
This is why we ask you to suffer with Christ during Lent. This is why we ask you to give up something you like for 40 days. I would hope that you picked that “something” well. I would hope it is something you are going to dearly miss on a daily basis so that when you long for it, you can remind yourself that is what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness. I hope it hurts you just a little bit so you can be reminded of how much Christ hurt over the awfulness of our world.
But we also ask you to begin this journey knowing that Easter is coming where the other half of the beatitude will come true. For those of us who ache, long and hurt for the kingdom of God, Easter is that morning where God says, “Let them be filled.” For those of us who are willing to hurt over the kingdom of God, to cry the tears that need to be cried, to suffer under the agony of a fast, please know that a blessing is coming called Easter morning, where we are reminded that our suffering only last for a night but joy comes in the morning.
And in the Easter season you will get to feast for 50 days that which you only fasted for 40 so that we can remind ourselves that the awfulness of our world is passing away so that God’s righteousness may reign.
Go-Before Grace 