Listen to Him

Listen to Him

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 26, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 17:1-9

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We’ve all heard it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” It’s a quote of Acts 16:31, and for some reason it’s usually recited in that archaic, King James language. It’s been posted on a billboard on I-5 down north of Vancouver at least since 1970 when I first moved to the Seattle area. It is what became Christianity’s most common message throughout most of its history: Believe on (or in) Jesus. That’s what’s required for salvation. That’s what God wants from us. Just believe in Jesus. That’s the thing you need to do. Christians have proclaimed this message so loudly for so long that it has virtually drowned out any other message the faith might have. It says that just believing in Jesus is what is important in our relationship with Jesus. “Believe in him” here usually means take as factually correct that he is who the faith has long said he is, believe the right things about his identity. Accept as fact that he is the Son of God Incarnate. Accept as fact that he is your personal Lord and Savior. That’s it. Believe. Just believe.

Now, of course there’s nothing wrong with believing that Jesus is the Son of God Incarnate and that he is our personal Lord and Savior. I believe those things too. I take them as correct and as full of meaning for my life and for yours. My confession that those things are true connects me with God. It gives my life meaning. It gives me hope in a world that can so lead us only to despair. It gives me courage in the face of illness and pain, and it gives me courage even in the face of death. So yes, indeed. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s doing that which makes us Christians.

Now, that is indeed all very well and good. It is nothing less than divine, but there’s something else about that I always feel compelled to say. See, if Christianity is only about believing in Jesus, then Christianity isn’t about anything else. If all our faith asks of us is to believe in Jesus, then nothing about Jesus really matters other than that we believe that he is who our faith says he is. If believing in him is all there is to Christianity, then it really doesn’t matter what he said or did. It only matters who he was. Folks, I am convinced that if we really understand our faith we will find that there is a lot more to it than just believing in Jesus’ divine identity. What he had to say really does matter.

Which, for me at least, makes the story of the Transfiguration, which appears in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), particularly striking. In that story, as Jesus is transfigured and talks with Moses and Elijah, a voice comes out of a cloud. Pretty clearly we are to understand that it is the voice of God. It says: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased….” Matthew 17:5 NIV And then it says one more thing. The voice issues a directive to Jesus disciples, represented by the three who went up the mountain with him in the story, and through them to us. What does that divine voice say? Does it say “believe in him”? No. To what I imagine must be the chagrin of a great many Christians it doesn’t say “believe in him.” It says: “Listen to him.” Listen to him. In this story, and I believe in truth, what God wants from us is not only that we believe in Jesus but also that we listen to him.

And here’s the problem: Believing in him is so much easier than listening to him, at least if we mean by “listen” not merely hear but heed, which I am sure is what the voice in the story means. Believing in him is something that we can do just with our minds. Believing as it is usually understood here means merely giving intellectual assent to what the Christian religion says about him. That’s easy, once you make the decision to do it. You say: OK. I agree. I believe in him. And you’re done. You’re saved. No problem.

Listening to him, hearing and heeding him, now that’s another matter altogether. It’s another matter altogether because what he says is really radical. It’s really difficult. Here’s one big thing he said. He said that God is a God of justice. Not justice as due process. Justice as caring about and for all people. Justice as every person having the necessities of life. Not just a privileged few having them. Everyone having them. That means no one having too much. When some have too much, some don’t have enough. That’s what Jesus said. That’s one of the things God wants us to hear him saying.

Jesus also said that God is a God of radical nonviolence. We heard the primary texts on divine nonviolence in Matthew in our service last week. There are others, but I think we all know that Jesus taught nonviolence as God’s way. Jesus taught nonviolence because violence always hurts at least some of God’s people. Jesus taught nonviolence because people who resist evil violently usually become evil themselves. The voice on that mountain in the Transfiguration story said “listen to him.” That means, among other things, listen to his proclamation of nonviolence as God’s way.

Jesus said other things that we need to listen to too. He said God loves you. He said God loves each and every one of you. He said God forgives you. He said God forgives each and every one of you. Always. No matter what. Most of us probably find that part of what Jesus said easier to listen to than his calls to justice and nonviolence, but not everyone does. Some people are so trapped in self-doubt and even self-loathing that they can’t believe God loves them. That God loves them unconditionally. They can’t hear Jesus saying that, and they can’t accept it. They’re the ones we need to say it to most of all. Maybe some of you are among those who need to hear it most of all. Maybe I am too. So let’s listen to Jesus speak of God’s love as much as hear him speak of God’s challenge. Listening to him the way the divine voice says we’re called to involves hearing all he had to say, what we find easy and what we find hard.

Our world today needs Christians who will listen to Jesus and not just believe in him as much as it ever has. Our world needs to hear his call to justice. We need to hear his call to care for the poor and the marginalized. We need to hear and follow his call to love our neighbor, even when our neighbor is an alien or a stranger. We need to hear his call to peace, for the world is so torn by violence and conflict.

And we need to hear his word of God’s love. Far too many people today can’t love themselves. They can’t love themselves, so they lose themselves in a vain search for worldly success. Or in alcohol. Or in drugs. Or even in suicide. They can’t love themselves so they can’t truly love anyone else either. So they hate people who are different from them. They hate foreigners. They hate people of different faiths. They hate people who love differently than they do. They hate people who look different from them. The world’s great spiritual traditions all say that if you want to transform the world, start by transforming yourself. Jesus says that too, and God calls us to listen to him when he does. Start by loving yourself the way God does, for the Great Commandment says “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus taught and showed us that God is love. Let’s start listening to him, shall we?

This coming week we enter the season of Lent, starting with Ash Wednesday three days from now. Lent is a time of preparation for Holy Week, especially Good Friday, and then, only after Good Friday, Easter. This year may our Lent be a time in which we prepare not just to believe in Jesus but to listen to him. That’s what God told Peter, James, and John to do on that hilltop so long ago. That’s what God calls us to do today. So yes, we believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus with all my heart and soul, and I hope you do too. But there’s more to being a Christian than that. There’s also listening to him. There’s listening to his call to justice, peace, and love. May God give us the wisdom and the courage to listen and to follow. Amen.

A Third Way

A Third Way

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 19, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Human life, you know, is filled with conflicting opposites. We deal with them all the time. Self and others. For many, family and work. For many, work and play. Chocolate cake and a bulging waistline. Politics and ordinary life. Duty and desire. Companionship, even intimacy, and solitude. Loving your grandkids and finding them absolutely exhausting. For far too many marital fidelity and a roving eye. The yard needing to be mowed and the Seahawks playing an afternoon game. We run into competing opposites all the time.

The scripture of the Christian faith is filled with conflicting opposites too. God and creation. God and the nation. Earth and heaven. Self and others—that one shows up in the life of faith as much as it does in other aspects of our lives. For far too many, politics and faith. Charity and personal spiritual practices. Charity and social justice—they aren’t the same thing you know. The body and the spirit—far too many Christians make these two competing opposites when they really aren’t. Personal desires and Christian morality—far too many Christians make that one something it doesn’t have to be too. In the life of faith as in all of our life we run into conflicting opposites all the time.

A great many Christians insist on seeing God and Jesus Christ only on one side of our conflicting opposites. They think God calls us always to choose between conflicting opposites. When faced with conflicting opposites they think there’s this way, and there’s that way, and God is only on one side or the other. Choose between them, they say. Take one way or the other. There’s no third choice, and only one of the choices is moral, only one of them is Christian.

Well, I want to tell you this morning that when faced with conflicting opposites Jesus rarely took one way or the other. He usually found a different way, a third way, his way, God’s way. It might not be obvious, but he’s actually doing that in the passage we just heard from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. In that passage Jesus is addressing the question of violence as a means of opposing evil and oppression. In our English translations he says “Do not resist an evil person.” He says if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek. If someone sues you to take your tunic, give him your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go a second mile with him. Sure sounds like he’s advising meek passivity in the face of oppression, doesn’t it? Well, he’s not. The late great theologian Walter Wink taught us that the word that gets translated as “resist” in the phrase “do not resist an evil person” actually means something like do not resist with armed force. Wink taught us that turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, and go the extra mile are actually examples of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to oppression. It sounds to us like Jesus is making a choice between meek acquiescence in oppression and violent resistance to oppression and choosing the former. He’s not. What he’s doing is finding a third way, a way that incorporates the sacred in each of the two options and rejects that which is itself evil in them. He found a third way. Not a way of compromise but God’s way between two sinful human ways.

Jesus does that in areas of concern other than the choice between passivity and violence too. Take the question of whether the life of faith is about personal piety and salvation on the one hand and transforming the world in the direction of divine justice on the other. Christians usually see an either/or choice here. Faith is about personal spirituality and salvation of the soul or it is about transforming the world. We think we have to choose between those two polarities. Both sides of the divide over that supposed choice, which today splits American Christianity in two, think they’re the ones choosing God’s side and think those who choose differently have lost touch with what God really wants.

Well, Jesus actually chose neither of those sides of the social justice or personal salvation question. He found a third way between them. He found the divine way of transforming the world through inner, personal, spiritual transformation. He rejected an exclusive focus on the world, and he rejected an exclusive focus on heaven. He proclaimed God’s radical justice for the poor and the marginalized, and he called his followers to develop a healthy inner spirituality that brings peace and salvation. He said don’t resist oppression by taking up arms against it. He said resist it by driving the oppressor out of your heart, out of your spirit. He thought that if enough people would do that, transformation of the world would come as a natural and unavoidable consequence of that inner transformation. He found a third way. He found God’s way, and he calls us to do the same.

We see this kind of either/or choice when we look at the future of the church. The future of this little church to be sure, but the future of the entire Christian church as well. We think we have a choice between being big and financially well of on the one hand and being small and probably dying on the other. I am convinced that if Jesus were here in person today he would tell us that that is a false choice. He would call us to find a third way. He would call us to find a way that rejects what is bad about both ways and keeps what is good about both ways, the good in the large church and the good in the small church rolled into one.

Big churches can be vital. They can be alive. They are filled with people, and those people can and often do perform great works of charity in their communities. But big churches can also be, and usually are, difficult places for new people to fit into. They are difficult places for new people to find true community. They often have big and quite rigid bureaucratic structures. Sometimes they hold together only because they have a charismatic preacher. When he leaves so do many of the people. Big churches also far too often preach really bad theology, theology for example that condemns women and gay people simply for being the way God created them and expects people to turn their brains off when they pass through the church door.

Little churches have their virtues and their challenges too. It is much easier for a small church to be community for people than it is for a big church to be that. It’s usually easier for new people to fit into the life of a little church than it is for new people to do that in a big one. Here are some examples: Our vice moderator Jesse is a newcomer to this church, but he has already become part of its leadership. Other new people have become active here in recent times too. Beate works with the deacons. Lisa sings with the music group, works in the kitchen, and has gotten us doing a better job of recycling than we’d been doing before. That would not happen in most big churches. It’s easier for people to make their voice heard in a small congregation than in a big one because there are far fewer voices clamoring to be heard in a small church than there are in a large one. Little churches definitely have their sacred virtues.

They have virtues, but they also have drawbacks. A little church can’t do as much in its community as a big church can. This little church is in pretty good financial condition, but many little churches aren’t. Churches with very limited financial resources can find it hard to call a pastor. People in little churches can think that their church doesn’t matter as much as a big one does. They can fear the future more than people in big churches do because their financial and human resources are quite limited.

Jesus call us, Jesus calls you, to find a third way between being a stereotypical big church and being a struggling little church with no future. Jesus says the third way of being church is to be a little church that is every bit as alive as the big churches sometimes seem to be. Keep the virtues of being small church. Love one another. Be community for one another, as indeed in many ways you are. Listen to each other. Not just to the longtime core members but to the new people too. But, Jesus says, drop the bad stuff about being a small church. Stop being panicked about your future, for God will be with you in whatever that future holds. Stop worrying that there is relatively little you can do outside these walls. Keep doing what you can. Keep doing what you have done and rejoice in it, giving thanks to God. When I’m gone seek a new pastor, yes; but don’t despair if you have trouble finding one. You’ve been church without a pastor before. You can do it again if you have to, and you’re better off with no pastor than with a bad one. There are lots of materials readily available online to help you do church by yourselves.

So: find God’s third way. Keep what is holy about you, and there is much that is. Don’t let that which is not holy in you stop you. Keep praying together. Keep coming together for worship and for work. Keep coming together for companionship and community. Keep listening for how God is calling you to be church in this time and place. There is a way. There is God’s third way. I pray that with the help of the Holy Spirit you will find it. Amen.

Choose Life

Choose Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 12, 2017

Scripture: Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things that are certain are death and taxes. Taxes may or may not be spiritual issues—I actually think that they are—but death is definitely a spiritual issue. Life and death: Two profound realities of human existence. All of us here today are physically alive, and most of us have been for quite some time. All of us here have experienced death. Not our own of course. Not yet, but we have experienced other deaths. Maybe for you, like for me, the first death we experienced was the death of a pet. I’ve heard it said that one reason for children to have pets is so that they can begin to experience death. Most of us at least have experienced the deaths of people too, often the death of someone we have deeply loved. A grandparent perhaps, or a parent, a spouse, maybe even a child. Most of us Americans don’t like to think about death much. Our culture does a pretty good job of avoiding the subject most of the time. Yet of course we can’t avoid it forever. It is too much a reality of human life. All humans, all animals, are mortal. We usually live ignoring that reality, and perhaps we must in order to keep on living. Still, there it is. It breaks into our lives. Eventually it will end our lives. That’s just how it is whether we like it or not.

The setting of our passage from Deuteronomy this morning is just before the Hebrew people cross the Jordan River to occupy Canaan, the land they believe their god has promised to give them. Deuteronomy, which actually dates from many, many centuries after the time of Moses, is set as Moses speaking to the people. He calls on them to choose life rather than death so that they may live long and prosper in the land they are about to enter and possess. In Deuteronomy choosing life basically means following and worshiping Yahweh. That’s fine, although I think Deuteronomy misses the mark when it says that doing that guarantees long life and prosperity. Still, this passage points us to something really important. In it Moses says “love the Lord your God and hold fast to him, for the Lord is your life.” The Lord is your life. God is your life. That is profound truth, one of the most profound truths in the whole Bible. Deuteronomy nails it with that one.

Deuteronomy nails it with that one, or at least it does if we understand the word “life” properly. Yes, God gives us physical life. God is the Creator of all that is, and that of course includes us. But I think there is another profound truth here, one that is if anything even more important. “The Lord is your life.” What does that mean? It means, I think, that the life God sets before us and asks us to choose is something more than merely being physically alive. The life God sets before us and asks us to choose is life with God. It is life in the spirit. It is the fullness of life, not merely the external characteristics of life.

Life in the spirit is something that is always open to us, but if you’re like me (and I suspect that in this respect most of you are) you don’t often choose it just as I don’t often choose it. In our American culture when we think of life we typically think of being biologically alive. We don’t so often think of life as being spiritually alive. Yet many of us know at some deep level that truly being alive means being spiritually alive. To be spiritually alive is to know that all this material stuff all around us, including the material stuff of which we’re made, is not all there is. To be spiritually alive is to know that there is so much more to life than material abundance and social prestige. To be spiritually alive is to know that God is that reality in which, as the book of Acts says, we live and move and have our being. To be spiritually alive is to live with a steady awareness that God is with us and in us every minute of our lives. That God is the ultimate reality to Whom we can always turn for comfort and for guidance. We do that through prayer. We do that through spiritual exercises like meditation or other practices that work to connect us with God.

Now of course whether or not to live in the spirit, whether or not to live life fully, is always a choice we have to make. In our reading from Deuteronomy it’s Moses who puts the choice between life and death before the people. I believe that God puts that choice before each and every one of us every day. We can choose life, real life, abundant life; or we can choose a physical life that is really a spiritual death. Moses said to the people “Choose life.” I say to you, and I say to myself, choose life. It’s up to us.

We are coming to a change in our lives. We are coming to the time in a few weeks when I will no longer be your pastor. I think perhaps both you and I regret that reality, although it was my choice and one I still am convinced I must make. As we come to that parting the choice between life and death lies before both you as a congregation and me as an individual who has been called to ministry. I won’t ask you to worry about my choice, but I urge you in the time ahead to choose life for this congregation. You are alive. You are good folk who are today’s incarnation of a church that has been alive in this community for well over one hundred years. You are a church where people have found welcome. Where people, including several new people who have been here less time than I have, have found a spiritual home. Keep being that spiritual home for all who come here. You will choose life if you keep loving one another. You will choose life if you keep serving this community.

You will choose life if you open yourselves to the calling of the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is not likely to call you only to remain what you have been in the past. God rarely calls anyone merely to remain what they have been in the past. It isn’t so much that the world around you is changing; rather, the world around you has already changed. Church as it used to be is not church as it will be. It will be up to you to decide how you will be church in the future. Will you have a pastor? Not necessarily. There are models out there of churches being vital, being alive, without a pastor. Will you stick with old, familiar theology? Or will you open yourselves to new insights and new ways of imaging and speaking about God? Only you can say. The choice lies before you. I say to you as Moses said to his people so long ago: Choose life.

God sets before us every day the choice between life and death. God calls us always to choose life. God calls us to choose life for ourselves individually and for the church collectively. That choice isn’t always easy, but here’s the good news about it. As we face that choice God is always with us, holding us in unfailing grace, calling us forward, nudging us in the direction of life. God wants us all to have a life that is full and abundant.

God will help us find that life; but here’s another thing we can’t deny. Eventually death comes to all of us. None of us is immortal. Institutions like churches aren’t either. Death is part of God’s creation, here’s what we always need to remember. Death never separates us from God. Ever. God is always calling us to new life, and God calls us to new life even beyond death. There is life for its people after the death of an institution too. So I pray that this church will choose life, and I beg you not to be afraid. God is with you. God loves you and holds you. God is here to help you. I pray that you will find this time of parting to be as much opportunity as loss. I pray that it will be that for me too.

So I say to you and I say to me: Choose life. Choose life with God, for God will never desert either you or me. God sets the choice before us. What we choose is up to us. So choose life. I pray that I will, and I pray that you will. Amen.

A True Fast

A True Fast

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 5, 2017

Scripture: Isaiah 58:1-12: Luke 10:25-37

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

To fast. Ah, now that to me is a great mystery. To refrain from eating food. I’ve got to be honest here. I don’t much like refraining from eating food. Yet I know that every spiritual tradition in the world teaches fasting as a powerful spiritual discipline. They say you fast to take your mind off of worldly things so it can concentrate on divine things. Christianity teaches that. So do Judaism and Buddhism. In Islam fasting is elevated to the level of one of the five basic “pillars” of the faith. During the month of Ramadan Muslims fast from sunup to sundown for that whole month. In Christianity the season of Lent that we’ll be entering soon was originally a time of fasting something like Islam’s Ramadan. I’m sure many of you remember the old Catholic rule about eating fish on Friday. The rule was actually that you refrain from eating red meat on Friday. That was seen as a kind of partial fast. Fasting has a long and honorable history in the world’s faith traditions; and frankly I don’t get it. Refrain from eating to take your mind off of worldly things so it can concentrate on divine things? I’ve got to tell you. When I’m really hungry my mind is continually on the very worldly thing of being hungry. So like I said. Fasting is a great mystery to me.

In our reading from Isaiah this morning we hear that fasting was a spiritual practice of the ancient Hebrews. In those verses Isaiah (actually probably so-called Third Isaiah, but never mind) tells us that the people of his time fast and expect God to reward them for doing so. They say “Why have we fasted, and you have not seen it?” They know that fasting is a spiritual practice that can be pleasing to God. So they do it, and they expect a reward. When the reward doesn’t come, they question God.

And that’s where this text gets really interesting. It tells us that God rejects the people’s fasting because they’re hypocrites when they do it. Isaiah has God say “On the day of your fasting you do as you please and exploit all your workers.” On their fast days they quarrel and fight. God says “You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard.” They think they humble themselves. They bow their heads. They even sit in sackcloth and ashes, traditional symbols of repentance. God asks them the rhetorical question ”Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” Apparently the people think that it is. The suggestion so far in this text is that the problem isn’t that the people fast, it’s that they don’t do it in the right spirit.

Yet in this passage it turns out that the problem with the people’s fasting isn’t that they do it in the wrong spirit. The problem is that they do it at all. In this passage it appears that God doesn’t want fasting. The problem is that the people think fasting is what God wants, and they’re wrong about that. The problem is that they don’t understand what God really wants from them.

So God tells them through the prophet what God really wants from them: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” God says God will bless the people if they “do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed.” That’s what God wants. Not that we convince ourselves that we’re righteous and God owes us one by undertaking some spiritual discipline that is for us an empty, external ritual. Justice. That’s what God wants from us. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Take in the stranger and give her shelter. Stop oppressing people, especially your workers, your employees. I suppose that means stop making them work under horrible working conditions and pay them a living wage. God says I don’t care about your rituals, rituals that are actually meaningless to you except that you do them to get some reward from me. Stop oppressing people. Care for the needy and the traveler. God says that’s the fast I want, using I guess fast as a metaphor for the life acceptable to God. Not fasting. Justice. That’s what God wants.

Folks, that passage from Isaiah was written around 2,500 years ago, but it speaks a powerful divine truth to us today. Today our nation has said to the hungry, weary traveler, to the refugee, or at least some of them: No! Not here! You are not welcome here. We won’t let you come in. We will not give you shelter. We will not be a safe place for you, for you come from the wrong country and practice the wrong religion. You’re not like us. So No! Go away! We don’t want you!

That, my friends, is a powerfully unchristian position that the executive branch of our federal government has taken. It violates the foundational ethics of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The ancient Hebrew prophets said shelter the wanderer. Jesus said respect the hated Samaritan. The Jews of Jesus’ time hated Samaritans the way far too many Americans hate Arabs and all Muslims. In his famous parable that we heard Jesus said No! Do not hate the Samaritan because of his nationality or his faith. Look at what the does. If he does what’s right accept him. Welcome him. He can be a hero even though he’s not like you. Folks, God knows how much we need to hear that lesson today. The ones you think are righteous may be getting it all wrong. Today Christians who hate Muslims and want to keep them all out of our country are getting it wrong. Isaiah said a true fast is doing justice. Jesus said love the foreigner you think you hate.

Yes, we have legitimate security concerns, and our nation has been doing a pretty good job at protecting us. Not perfect, but then nothing human is perfect. Refugees seeking asylum in our country go through a vetting process that can take as long as 2 years. No one from one of the seven countries on President Trump’s banned list has committed an act of violence in our country. Ever. Most of the 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and that nation isn’t on the President’s list. Arbitrarily banning people from entering our country because of their nation of origin is un-American. More importantly for us, it is un-Christian. It is not doing the justice Isaiah demands from us. It is saying the priest and the Levite are the heroes of Jesus’ parable rather than the Samaritan, the real hero of the story.

So let’s focus on what Isaiah says is a true fast. Doing justice. Caring for people in need. Not oppressing people. That is the fast God wants from us. Spiritual disciplines like fasting can be powerful tools in the life of faith. They can be acceptable and even pleasing to God. But they are that only if they lead us into a true fast, the fast of justice. Today more than ever we need to understand that truth. More than understand it we need to live it. May God give us the wisdom and the courage to do it. Amen.