Sermon: The Fast God Chooses

 

First Presbyterian Church

February 18, 2026, Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

 

The Fast God Chooses

 

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

It’s one of those phrases that is so familiar, we assume by default it must be in the Bible, but it’s not; it’s from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, dating at least back to 1662.  It is part of the burial service, reminding those in attendance that all of us are subject to the same finality as the deceased.  Not surprisingly, a phrase about ashes pops into the mind of many when the subject of Ash Wednesday comes up.  

Ash Wednesday is not an inappropriate time to consider our own mortality.  It marks the beginning of the season of Lent, the culmination of which finds us at a crucifixion site outside Jerusalem, where even our Savior tasted of the pain and indignity of human death.  It is not inappropriate for us to keep in mind our own finiteness, the knowledge that our days are numbered, and that we don’t know exactly what that number is going to be.  At the end of this service, you will be invited to take up a Lenten discipline and to come forward and receive a mark on your forehead or hand, a cross of ashes, and you will hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It is not at all inappropriate to remember and reflect upon our finiteness on this day.  The challenge is: what will we do with that knowledge?  How will that reflection affect us?

There are good ways to be affected, and there are bad ways.  There are positive ways to carry forward that realization, and there are negative, even damaging ways.  

Matthew cautions us against some of those negative ways.  In these verses Jesus warns his followers against the kind of piety and fasting that damages.  Matthew records Jesus’s warnings in the context of three different kinds of pieties; giving alms, praying, and fasting.  In each case Jesus weighs in against the kind of giving, praying, or fasting that exists mainly to be noticed by others.  As crazy as it sounds, an influential person might well have had a trumpeter at hand to “announce” his gift before the public.  (Today that person would just hire publicists or spin doctors for the same effect.)  Likewise, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see such a person out on the street praying in a particularly ostentatious manner.  (We have “prayer breakfasts” for that now, I guess.)  And a person on a fast might well go about with a face pulled down into a frown, all the better to provoke others to ask “oh, dear, what’s wrong?”

Note that Jesus is not warning against giving alms or praying or fasting; in fact Jesus presumes his followers will give alms and pray and fast – “whenever you give alms,” “whenever you pray,” “whenever you fast.”  But the heart of the matter is why his followers pray or give or fast; is it to receive the praise of others?  To check off a couple of boxes on the Official Good Person Scorecard?  Or is it to give honor to God?  

Isaiah adds a slightly different dimension to the question of practicing pieties like prayer and fasting.  For Isaiah, it’s not just a matter of the public nature of the piety; it’s also about whether the whole life matches up to that public piety.  For example:

If you sit down to your meal, but those who labored to make that meal possible are living in poverty or abuse despite their labor, is that the fast God chooses?

If you pray and sing and make all sorts of joyful noise in worship, but turn a blind eye when others of whatever faith cannot worship in peace without being harassed or even killed, is that the fast God chooses?

Short answer: no.

To the degree that we do not pursue justice in all its forms, to the degree that we tolerate or even profit from oppression or exploitation, to the degree that we assume hunger or homelessness or poverty or lack of educational opportunity or any of the conditions that plague women and men and children around us is "their fault," our fast is pointless or worthless.  It is no service to God whatsoever.  

This is how our mortality, our knowledge of our finitude and limited time, is to move us; to refuse to live with the way things are, to refuse to live in ease because of the oppression and exploitation of others, to loose the bonds of injustice, to set free the oppressed, to share our bread with those in need of bread and on down the list that Isaiah gives us, that is the fast God chooses.  This is our rightful service.  This is what goes hand in hand with the right-minded piety Jesus teaches in Matthew 6.  The piety that comes from our deepest longing, the piety that cares only to be seen before God, the piety that changes the world: this is the fast God chooses.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #166, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, You teach us 

Sermon: Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Hour; or, Be Woke

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 30, 2025, Advent 1A (the sermon that would have been preached except for the snow)

Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

 

Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Hour, 

or, Be Woke

 

It happened Friday, late morning, more years ago than I can remember. I am not a Black Friday shopper, and in fact I slept in while others across the country were fanning out to retail stores across the country to appease the gods of commerce in the guise of “getting ready for Christmas.”

But I did want something to eat.

So, I was off to a favorite eating establishment for a very early non-turkey lunch, whilst also juggling both sermon prep and Sunday-school prep in my mind. It may sound odd, but lunchtime can be some of the most effective sermon-prep time I have. I don’t understand it, but I’m happy to take advantage of it.

So there I was, order placed, settling in at a table with my very large tumbler of sweet tea (peach-flavored, as is often the case), when it happened. “Holiday music” started attacking my brain.

I think Mel Tormé was in there, with the chestnuts roasting on an open fire. I remember both “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” being part of the assault. It was relentless. Horrifying, even. And my brain was indeed withering under the assault. I enjoyed my lunch, but no real progress happened on the sermon that was about forty-eight hours from delivery at that point. 

It is by now old hat to complain about how soon the barrage of worldly trappings that gets called “Christmas season” kicks in. There were radio stations playing Christmas music 24/7 even before Halloween, for goodness’ sake.

It’s pretty easy to get lulled to sleep by the ongoing headlong rush of “tidings of comfort and joy,” to be anaesthetized by the omnipresent greenery and bell-ringers at every retail entrance and lush soundtrack of crooned carols. If you’re fortunate enough to escape it before Thanksgiving, it only escalates beyond imagination the day after.

Today’s readings from Isaiah and Matthew are out to deliver serious disruption, a world-altering one-two punch, to such complacency and numbness.

It’s not hard to see in Matthew’s account of one of Jesus’s late teachings. This particular scripture has a long history of being “fear fodder” – the kind of passage preachers turn to who want to strike some fear into their congregation. It’s the kind of passage that gets turned into books about the “rapture” and how badly tribulation goes for the “left behind” while the “saved” presumably look on smugly and safely from heaven.

Matthew would be thoroughly perturbed at the use of his gospel in this way. For Matthew, the immediate problem in the community to which he wrote was quite the opposite; writing as he was at a time when the followers of Christ had been scattered around the Mediterranean and the eyewitnesses to the life and teaching of Christ were dying, Matthew’s community was beginning to despair of any reunion with Christ at all. To this end Matthew warns his readers not to presume that all is lost, but to remember that “about that day no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” If even the Son did not know the time for that gathering up of God’s people, how could we humans claim to know it was all called off?

Of course, that proclamation hasn’t stopped people from calculating, down to the year and month and date, and sometimes even down to the hour or minute or second, when Jesus would return. I guess Jesus must just be dumb in their eyes.

The author and retired Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor puts Matthew’s insistence on the unknowability of that time like this:

He was not concerned with reading signs and keeping timetables, at least partly because he knew how preoccupied people could get with those things. Before long they cared more about their calculations than they did about their neighbors. Once they had figured out who God’s 144,000 elect were, they did not waste any time or courtesy on the damned, except perhaps to remind them just how hot hellfire was going to be. Meanwhile, God’s chosen had plenty else to do: flee the cities, arm themselves against the enemy, purify themselves for their journey to heaven. Once they had gotten themselves all worked up about this, Matthew found it just about impossible to impress them with the fact that there were widows and orphans in the community going hungry because no one was signing up for the soup kitchen, or that there were still some people in jail who needed visiting, as well as some sick people at home who still needed looking after. But what did any of that matter, when the end was right around the corner?[i]

 

Matthew’s words are not about “skipping to the end of the book” and putting life on cruise control until the “rapture” rolls around; it’s about the utter necessity to keep living the life of a follower of Christ without relenting. You don’t know the day, you don’t know the hour; the only real option is to keep doing Christ’s work in God’s world, no matter how bleak – or even more, because of how bleak the world is looking around us. Case in point: those lines about "one taken...the other left. In the days of the Roman Empire two could be walking or working or anything and the Empire could take one away for any reason or no reason at all. If that sounds too familiar in the present-day USA, well, there's the point again. At any rate cruise control is over; the real work of being a follower of Christ begins now.

The message from Isaiah is not dramatically different. Isaiah’s prophecy in this passage has a clear “not yet” quality to it. You can scan through it quickly and see how much the word “shall” is used to translate Isaiah’s message:

“In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established…”

“…all the nations shall stream to it.”

“Many peoples shall come and say…”

“He shall judge between the nations…”

Even the most famous quote from this passage is couched in “shall” language – “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” and “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” – it’s all still an object of future happening. And we can clearly look around and see a distinct lack of such change around us.

But then, notice what follows next, in verse 5:

“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.” Not a “shall” in sight.

Imperative – “come.” “Let us walk.” Do this. Do this now. Even Isaiah sees the need to call the people not to get caught up in future dreaming, but to do now what the Lord calls God’s people to do, to “walk in the light of the Lord.” 

As is typically the case, the first Sunday of Advent in particular is a two-sided observance. Yes, we begin the period of waiting and marking the days to the firstappearance of Christ on earth, the event we celebrate on Christmas. But this day also reminds us, a bit stubbornly, that the Incarnation is not the end of the story, and that we still live in Advent as we await that time when Christ shall come and call us unto himself. We still wait, we still prepare, and not unlike Matthew’s readers, sometimes we give up hope.

But our call has not changed. We are still charged to be followers of Christ in a world that does not want us to be followers of Christ, even though the world desperately needs us to be followers of Christ. There are still the poor, the hurting, the ones who live under regular and constant threat of violence, the forgotten, the lost, those who no longer know why they’re here, the ones whom nobody loves. They are still waiting for us to show and live the gospel to them. 

If the church’s “New Year’s Day” means anything to us, perhaps it is the kick-in-the-pants we need, to paraphrase A Brief Statement of Faith in our Book of Confessions, to receive courage from the Spirit in a broken and fearful world. In a time of increasingly open racism and misogyny and xenophobia and hatred of every kind, being enacted gloatingly and with pride even by people who call themselves Christians, we are still charged with being bearers of good news, being followers of Christ. Perhaps this beginning of Advent is a wake-up call, dare I say a call to "be woke", a call not to fear nor to gloat; a call to pay attention and keep following Jesus. 

So, no more sleeping. No more snooze button. Wake up. Be awake. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #352, My Lord! What a Morning; #104, O Lord, How Shall I Meet You; #384, Soon and Very Soon

 

 

---

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Don’t Say When: Expecting the Second Coming,” Christian Century 121:19 (September 21, 2004); accessed online November 26, 2016 at http://christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/dont-say-when

 

 

Sermon: Scriptural Whiplash

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 16, 2025, Pentecost 23C

Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19

 

Scriptural Whiplash

 

 

At first glance, one might have trouble imagining why these two scriptures were paired up in today's lectionary. If anything, they might seem to be diametrically opposed to one another. 

The words from the next-to-last chapter of the book of Isaiah are a look at a time yet to come. Images within this passage both hearken back to earlier writings (the serpent's payback in verse 25, being reduced to eating dust, seems a deliberate echo of the fall story in Genesis) and anticipate future oracles (Revelation 21 starts with a very clear of Isaiah's verse 17 here). The promise here is that the Lord, to borrow a phrase from chapter 43 of this book, is doing a new thing; not just the new heavens and earth but a "new Jerusalem" as a source of joy rather than sorrow. Long lives are the rule rather than the exception; people get to enjoy the fruits of their labor without having them taken away; animals live in harmony with one another. It is a deeply optimistic vision.

Luke's reading, on the other hand, is anything but optimistic at first blush. Jesus speaks of the temple being destroyed, an event still in the future in Jesus's time but already done by the time Luke's gospel was written. Wars and insurrections were not at all unknown in that time. Persecution is familiar to Luke's readers, with martyrdom coming first to the deacon Stephen and later to the apostle James, not to mention such early church leaders as Paul, executed somewhere around the year 62 - again, well before Luke's gospel was written. Verse 12 almost sounds like Jesus foretelling his own fate as one that awaited his followers as well. (And that instruction in verse 14, the one about "not to prepare your defense in advance"? Does that leave anyone else feeling a bit shaky? But then, the apostles in the early chapters of the book of Acts, being filled with the Spirit when brought before the Temple authorities, might be an example of following this instruction.)

So, the two readings assigned to today don't immediately seem to have much in common, and one might a kind of scriptural whiplash moving from Isaiah's joyful vision to Jesus's more hard-edged discourse in Luke. However, if we "widen the field" just a bit we discover that, far from being in opposition to one another, these two scriptures may in fact be in harmony with each other, or at least singing from the same hymnal, so to speak. 

Our reading today comes from the next-to-last chapter of Isaiah. The final portion of this book is primarily addressed to the Israelites who had returned from exile in Babylon. What they found when they returned, to be honest, was not much. The Temple, what had been the central point of Jewish worship and practice, was broken down and not functional. The same could be said of the homes and farmland that had been left behind; what had once been fertile soil and dwelling places was now mostly wasteland. 

Roughly the last eleven chapters of Isaiah are addressed to these returnees, whose current life and standing looked nothing like the beautiful vision Isaiah pours out here. These chapters contain a lot of lament from the people, a goodly amount of chastisement directed at those same people for their sins and shortcomings, and the occasional piece of encouragement, of which this is the most well-known example. That new heaven and new earth will come, but there will be challenges along the way, and some of those challenges will even be self-imposed.

Similarly, the passage from Luke does not tell the whole story. After the event at the Temple when Jesus comments on the poor widow who gave everything she had, some of the disciples have gotten distracted by how impressive the Temple was, which frankly was part of the purpose for which it was built. Jesus makes his pronouncement about its destruction (as we have already noted) and continues with the forth-telling, continuing to add more and more calamities to the list. 

But then, when his listeners might have been on the brink of despair at all manners of disasters and forebodings, Jesus throws this curveball in verse 28:

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

 

Just when all seems lost, the tables turn and the Son of Man appears. 

In the end, it turns out, these two readings are far from opposed; one might say they're both pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle, each fitting into its place in the overall story we are given in scripture. There will be hardship and difficult times; there will be (or have already been) wars and insurrections; but still the new heaven and earth come, our redemption draws near. 

Notice one thing missing from these stories; at no point is the follower of Christ called to "go to war" or anything like that. The closest thing we get to an order is in that verse 28; "stand up and raise your heads...". That's it. We stand up and we look for Jesus. 

To be sure, standing has its own risks. You might get thrown down on the ground, choking, with somebody's knee on your throat. You might get a bunch of pepper balls shot right at your face. Nonetheless, amidst all the signs and rumors and violence and fear, we stand and look for the Son of Man. 

We know from Isaiah that a new heaven and a new earth are coming,

We know from what Luke wrote down from Jesus that there will be many fierce challenges on the way. 

And between the two of them, we know how it ends.

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #839, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine!; #767, Together We Serve; #738, O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee