A sermon by Jenny Borden - Fast for Life, Food for Life

A sermon by Jenny Borden for Ash Wednesday to launch the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance's Food for Life and Fast for Life campaigns.

The EAA’s campaign is called “Food for Life”. Today we are asking people to “Fast for Life.”

More than one billion people are suffering from hunger around the world. Despite the goodness and bounty of God’s gifts to us in creation so many people experience scarcity: famine, hunger, deprivation and want. And yet at the same time there are people in all parts of the world who suffer the effects of too much – too much salt, sugar, fat, calories – too much choice, too many things, too much wealth.

The EAA’s food campaign aims to build and strengthen the ecumenical movement for food justice, and our “fast for life” aims to create awareness of these issues and a desire to take individual and collective action to change things.

And Ash Wednesday is a good time to think carefully about the injustice of the world food situation, where food is unjustly and unsustainably produced, and unjustly and unsustainably consumed, and where the right to food for all people is not met.

There are so many themes that run through Ash Wednesday, and through this service, including sorrow and repentance, hypocrisy and passion. But the one that attracts me most – probably because of what I do – is hinted at in a number of places but especially in our Old Testament reading: “Is this not the fast that I choose – to loose the bonds of injustice….to share your bread with the hungry……to let the oppressed go free

In this passage certain kinds of religious practices and fasts are rejected in favour of “the fast that I choose…….So what fast do we choose?

The EAA is asking it members and supporters to take time to consider the issue of food this Ash Wednesday and this Lent. And to be in solidarity with those that are hungry by fasting for a day – and to choose between fasting from food, fasting from fossil fuel or fasting from consumption, as an act of solidarity and a means of raising awareness.

The challenge in this passage from Isaiah is to leave on one side the religious gestures that might make us feel better but don’t do the hungry much good, in favour of actions that really make a difference.

Our fasting, our Lenten practices, our tiny life-style changes, our charitable giving, our guilt infested prayers may all be examples of empty gestures – and incidentally most of them rather public rather than hidden, as we are warned against in our gospel reading.

And it is not just our personal efforts. We know too that all of our work has its problems – is it effective, is the money well spent, do we enjoy engaging in policy debates about structural issues while millions are hungry and can’t wait for the world to change?

So where does this put our campaigning and advocacy work, our fasting for a day from food or fossil fuel or consumption? Can we, if we work very hard at it, use it to help build up strong, intelligent, realistic, persistent voices and actions with our companions across the world? That together, over time, can challenge the systems and structures and powers that leave people hungry? Can we keep working together and trying until we make a real difference?

Or do we give up or do nothing or enjoy the empty gesture of cynicism where we continually ask the question “Well So What?” and indulge in the “Is there any point, the problem is so big, nothing works, my tiny efforts won’t change things”.

Not if we stand with the Christ like God of Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and Easter Day. No:

- we heed the warning about empty gestures – the fast he does not choose – but we do take action to remind ourselves that one billion people are hungry and raise awareness of this issue, and play our own small part in the way that we live our lives, and the way that we fast and pray,
- we goad and encourage one another in Christ to be part of and build up justice movements that really make a difference,
- we live in the hope of a costly cross that proved love to be creative and not a disaster
- and we accept that we’re never going to get it all right and so live confidently in the sorrow and forgiveness of Ash Wednesday, that does not reject us because we fail but wraps us around and includes us all as part of a community, where even failures like us are still valued for what we can achieve. Amen

Copyright (c) Jenny Borden, EAA