Sunday February 8th, 2026 Worship

Yesterday, I went to a workshop on the topic of “Practicing Faith in the Age of Radicalization.” So, with that in mind, and as someone who loves to study history, religion, and the patterns that occur within both fields, I am always fascinated by the Israelites in today’s Isaiah reading and their similarity to us today. At its core, it gets to a deeper question about our religious traditions and why we are choosing to engage in certain rituals. It wasn’t like the Israelites were fasting just for fun, and it wasn’t even that the didn’t initially have good intentions, but ultimately, they are frustrated by the way that God is not responding to their fasting in the ways they would like to see. This isn’t just a problem of the Israelites, but within it, we see the people navigating this age-old tension between focusing on having the right words or practicing those rituals in the right way. They are doing what they think they are supposed to be doing, as they are re-establishing a relationship with God following the exile, and yet they are just met with frustration, their own and God’s.
The Israelites are whining and complaining about God not responding to their fasts when God speaks through the prophet Isaiah, issuing a strong directive about how the people need to shift their understanding when it comes to their relationship with God. Their belief that God simply wanted them to fast and call it good is disconnected from the way that God is also desiring right relationships between people too. We hear the words, “Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and to not hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58: 6-7). God is issuing this correction in order to help people see that their faith isn’t just something that they should engage in every once in a while, when they want something from God, or that their faith has no impact on how they go about their daily lives. Their fasting doesn’t make up for the ways that they harm others and abuse those who work for them, they turn away from their neighbors, and they fight amongst each other the rest of the time when they are not fasting.
This fast that God calls for is a fast from our self-importance, isolation, and hyper-individualism. It is a fast that is meant to humble ourselves so that we can see the way we are interconnected with all of creation. How what we do has an impact on the world around us and how we are in turn impacted by the rest of creation. It goes back to our Lutheran understanding of salvation, in which we acknowledge that we are freed from sin and freed for service to the world around us. Our fasting from these harmful behaviors and oppressive systems then isn’t meant to be a way of getting God’s attention, to show off our righteousness and faithfulness, but is something that we do as a response to the grace that we have already received from God. Righteousness then is able to shift back into this sense of being in right relationship with God and neighbor instead of something that we do to boast about ourselves and our greatness.
All of this conversation about fasting and righteousness continues to circle around our understanding of the commandments. As Jesus even says today, he didn’t come to abolish the commandments, the law and the prophets and all that came before, but his teachings continue to expand upon them (Matthew 5: 17-20). He tells people to continue to be grounded in their teachings and lifts up the Pharisees as examples of deeply religious people who spend significant time and energy really looking at what it means to live according to the law (Matthew 5: 20). We don’t often hear the Pharisees being described in this way, but they genuinely were faithful people who wanted to understand what it meant to live in right relationship with God, even though they didn’t always get it right either. It’s why Jesus’ actions are sometimes so difficult for them because it challenged the way they understood their faith. Yet, like us, they could become stuck in the rigid structure of wanting to prove that their faith is right and other peoples’ is wrong.
In a similar manner, Jesus is inviting us into that active relationship with our faith. It isn’t something that we were just supposed to accept and think about for an hour a week and then move on with our lives as if nothing was different. Grounded in our baptismal promises to be among God’s people, to hear the Word and partake in the Lord’s Supper, to proclaim the Good News, follow the example of Jesus, and work for justice and peace,” as well as the Commandments, we are given a guide to help us move forward. This is why we gather as a community, to wrestle with what our faith means for us in our daily lives, and to offer encouragement when the road feels long. To see the ways that God is calling us back when we get so stuck in our routine that we forget the purpose.
When we think about what all of this fasting language means for us today, we are encouraged to truly take a look at why we are doing the things that we are. Are we going through the motions because this is what someone said we were supposed to do to be good people? Are we doing them because this is how things have always been done so why bother questioning it? Are we doing them because they give us time and space to bring us closer to God and our neighbor, even when that might mean, in fact it probably will mean, some discomfort on our part?
I think our fasting requires discomfort from us. To interrogate the ways we have become complacent and have rested on the laurels of our privilege, choosing self-righteous glory over the Gospel, comfort over the message of the cross. Just as the Israelites missed the point of what their fasting was supposed to do, so too do we have a problem when we forget that Jesus was here to resist Empire instead of build one up. When he was here to reject the ways that people turned on one another, casting blame instead of taking accountability. When he came preaching mercy and justice, even as the very Empire he was resisting crucified him, treating him as no different than the other criminals who were used to send a message about the power the Empire had to rid itself of those deemed problematic to those watching these executions. Our fasting then isn’t just about the actions that we do to “please” God, but they are about what helps us to remove the sticky bits that have stuck in our hearts from society that make it harder to hear where God is calling us together. It clears space in our hearts to not just ask of God, but to receive from God the strength and conviction we need to keep preaching the Gospel even we the world wants to shut our message down or we are struggling with what we believe in the midst of all the chaos.
So, our fast doesn’t just have to be food centric. Instead, I invite us to see the ways that we are called to fast from the things in this world that get in the way of allowing us to see our neighbors as Beloveds of God, to see creation as something that God created good and is worthy of existence solely on that fact, and to see the ways that we are empowered to care for one another for the sake of everyone’s flourishing. This is the fast that God chooses for us. One that is grounded in God’s sense of justice and peace, not our own self-righteousness. A fast the frees us from ourselves to imagine the way the world can be and frees us to begin acting to make that a reality.