Appetite

Over the last couple weeks, I've been watching a show on Netflix that I really, really love. It's a British show, which should surprise, like, none of you. But it's called The Repair Shop, and in it are a bunch of artisans and craftsmen who are all about restoring things that, for one reason or another, have been in a state of disrepair. It could be neglect. It could be overuse and misuse or age. It could be that they've been way too loved or way too played with.

It could be that they've been through some incredible journeys. Like, one of my favorite ones is about a violin who, with its owner, survived through Auschwitz. And, like, there's amazing stories that happen. And these artisans and craftsmen come, and they get these items that people bring in that have immense attachment to these items. And then the artisans work on restoring them and bringing them back to life.

And the thing I've learned in this is that restoration is a tricky business. It takes a lot of skill and practice, but each piece is unique. It has unique attachments and unique challenges.

And I find that to be both incredibly delightful but also kind of overwhelming. And it's kind of how I felt when I sat down to do this sermon today, for this, the first Sunday of Lent. And here's why.

Usually when you think a sermon is good, it's something that people can easily get a hold of, and it has some real step-by-step things that you can use and put into your life, and then, yay. And, you know, like, simple things. Like, you know, people come up and they say, Jesus did this thing, therefore you should do such and such.

Or, it's really clear, this is sin and this is holy, now you know. Or, if you do this, all this will be well. But in this season of Lent, where we're going with Jesus into wilderness, and we're going to be looking at some pretty significant and rough things, it is not simple.

And what I have to talk to you about this week is hunger. Not just hunger for food and things like that, but hunger for things that we need that can sometimes get out of kilter. And this is really incredibly difficult to talk about, because hunger and our relationship with it is really multifaceted and unique.

And the process of restoration is tricky. So, it's not really easy for me to sit down here and say, this is your three-step plan to restoration. Hooray!

But instead, it's kind of a messy journey. And I want you to come with me, and I want you to give me a lot of grace. Because what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about Jesus.

Talk about why that's important. And then give us some suggestions for ways that we can begin to wrestle with that in our own lives. Won't be a whole bunch of answers, but it'll be a lot of challenges.

I think this is important because I think God is in the business of restoration. So, the other thing I want to just give you a heads up on is be thinking and be paying attention to the moment you get judgmental. Like, if you find yourself responding judgmentally to yourself or to somebody else, make a note of that.

Because perhaps that's a place where your hunger is a little out of whack. So, now I've given you all that preamble. How about we just pray, and then we'll get into it.

God, we just ask that you, as you are present here, would come and fill this place with your peace Lord, help what I say get filtered through your spirit and touch people's hearts and minds and invite us with you as we walk through the wilderness. So, the beginning of this year, we had a sermon series that was looking at the stories in Jesus' life between his birth and when his ministry started.

So, we had a number of different things, like when he went to the temple and when he was baptized and when he went into the desert. And I had this privilege about six weeks ago of preaching a sermon on the genealogy of Christ up into the baptism. And so, basically, let me recap that for you.

I pretty much me-tooed half of the Old Testament and then I talked about how that ties into Jesus. What I actually said, what I staked my claim on was this idea that when Jesus was baptized, there was this amazing moment. The Holy Spirit comes down from heaven like a dove and this voice comes down from heaven that says, This is my son with whom I am well pleased.

And in that moment, God was not just affirming Jesus' divinity, but he was also affirming all of the humanity that was wrapped up in Jesus at that moment. So, we looked at his genealogy and all the stories and all the brokenness and also the successes and the life. All of that was encapsulated in this moment of Jesus.

And that God was affirming not just his divinity and not just his humanity, but the integration of the two in that moment. Oh, I'm tripping on things. Okay.

And what I argued with that was we could find ourselves in that genealogy. We could find ourselves in the story, which means we belong here in this place where God is calling us to become like his son. So, I think that when we go from the story of Jesus' baptism and travel into the wilderness, we also can learn both from the humanity and the divinity and the integration of those two in Christ,

what it means to walk in wholeness, what it means to walk in shalom. And how I define that is like harmony, right relationship with ourselves and God, with ourselves and ourselves, with ourselves and our communities and the people around us, and with ourselves and creation. So, let's look at this.

Jesus has this moment. He goes to get baptized. The Holy Spirit falls down from heaven like a dove.

And this voice says, this is my son with whom I am well pleased. And that is an incredible moment. He's had this new identity proclaimed for everybody there, who then also told everybody else, who told everybody else, you know this had a trickle effect, that he was God's son.

But that proclamation wasn't enough. So, it says that the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. And for me, that says that this was a move of purpose and preparation.

That the Holy Spirit needed to work in and through and with Jesus to prepare him for more than just the announcement that he was God's son, but the ministry is God's son. And that identity needed to go from just a thing that was spoken over him to a thing that was his. So, the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness.

And for 40 days and nights, Jesus fasted. He was separated from everyone and everything and had nothing else. And this 40 days and 40 nights is kind of where we get the concept of Lent in the church, which, if you don't know, today is the first Sunday of Lent.

And it's this thing that we celebrate or we go through or we practice in the 40 days before Easter. And as a person growing up in the Mennonite church, we talked about Lent, but we never saw it as this thing that I was going to give something up for Lent. Instead, it was this spiritual journey that we were taking.

But I heard a lot of my friends say they were giving up things for Lent. And I could never figure out why. Like, why was Jesus going into the wilderness?

Why was this moment for us to suddenly do things of self-denial? Because my friends would say things like, I'm giving up chocolate for Lent. Or my family's giving up meat for Lent.

Or we're giving up TV for Lent. I even heard some friends tell me that they were giving up Lent for Lent. I was like, that was pretty clever.

But I really didn't get why we were doing this. And even as I grew up, I had friends who had more sophisticated and interesting things that they gave up. Like, my friend Sydney gave up alcohol and hip-hop for Lent.

And that made me feel very sorry for her until I found out that that's how she met her husband then. So I guess it was a win in her favor. So I also have a friend named Robert who last year and this year also has given up throwing unnecessary shade for Lent.

Which I'm sure is really good for his soul. But for those of us who follow him on social media, we are missing out on a lot. But I still just was not getting, like, why are we doing this thing where I'm giving something up?

Are we just doing it because Jesus fasted? Like, what is the point of this? What are we trying to do in Lent?

And I wrestled with this so much until I heard Brian McLaren talk about fasting one day. And he talked about the fact that when he's driving and somebody cuts him off in traffic, he does not have the self-control to not cuss that person out. And that is something he struggles with a lot.

But he said, you know, what I can is I can fast from lunch today and spend some time with God in that moment. And in that process, I'm doing what I can today so that I can do what I can't tomorrow. I'm growing this muscle, this practice, this moment so that sooner or later I'll get to the place where, when someone cuts me off in traffic, I don't respond.

And that transformed the idea of Lent to me. Because I realized that God does not call us to fast or give things up because he just doesn't want us to have any of the good stuff. But instead, it is much more about caring who we are becoming.

It's about us being known and being fully known and also knowing. Knowing who we are and whose we are. And fasting has a plan and a purpose in our development, in our becoming who we were created to be.

It is this means through which something gets addressed. So armed with that, I transformed the way I looked at Lent. And it became much more about, who is it that God wants me to become?

What is standing in my way? And what can I do to grow past that? So one year for Lent, I gave up three lies I believed about myself.

That was a hard journey. Also, the year before I came to the table, I gave up being a Protestant for Lent. I hadn't found a church yet, and so I decided I was going to go every day to the Catholic Church.

At the end of my road. That was really interesting. We'll talk about it later, because it doesn't have so much to do with the sermon.

But these are the things that are really important for me. Finding a way during Lent to grow and to be more like who God has called me to be. And when you look at the Hebrew calendar and what eventually became the Christian calendar, you see that God put in relationships with fasting and with feasting and with hunger in the calendar for a purpose.

Because fasting is a tool. It's something to help us grow. It's to help us realize and understand our relationship with hunger.

So there are these cycles in the Hebrew calendar where there are some fasts and feasts, and all of them were done in the context of the faith community. And each transformed and informed the daily, everyday life. Because when people fasted, they were doing things out of remembrance.

Knowing who we are and where we have been. And it was about preparation and about realignment. Re-committing ourselves to something and repenting.

It enabled us again to relearn the importance and the right place of hunger and the right place of boundaries. Feasting also was super important in this because it was also about remembrance. About knowing who we are and who has provided for us.

It was a time of celebration where we could enjoy things and indulge. And it helped us relearn joy and savoring the things that we eat. And having gratitude for what we have.

Feasting and fasting both contribute to the way we see our everyday eating. But neither is a place of dwelling. Wholeness is found in the everyday, not in the extremes.

It's found in the everyday shalom and harmony Where what we are doing is in harmony with our God, with ourselves, with those around us, and with our community. Hunger in and of itself is not a bad thing. And the truth is we hunger for so many things.

Like it's not just what we need to sustain our lives so that we can keep going doing things. We hunger for so many things like affection and ambition and security and beauty and knowledge and money and relationship. And we were designed to have a healthy relationship with our appetite.

With our hunger for things. We were designed for harmony and wholeness and shalom. Because hunger is, at that point in time, a useful and life-giving tool.

But this depends so much on our identity. It depends on how we see ourselves, who we are, and whose we are. Because shalom in relationship helps us have healthy hunger.

But when things are discordant, when they're off kilter, the hunger is no longer healthy. I'm not going to, it's not, I don't think, going out on a limb to say that all of us in one way or another do not have a completely healthy understanding of our appetites for whatever it is. And I'm pretty confident we all have threadbare places where what we've observed, what we've experienced, what has been done to us or what we have lived through, what we've been taught and seen modeled around us,

what has been, what we have seen taken away from us or withheld from us, have affected who we've become and given us a skewed sense of self. And in this, our relationship to what we need gets off kilter. It affects our appetites and our hungers.

And what is good becomes dissonant. How we look for affection, how we look for security, how we long for food, how we long for comfort, how we need beauty, how we need significance is radically changed. And this disordered relationships with our appetites, it creates a disharmony, a dissonance that makes us vulnerable to further disorder.

So if I was speaking up here and all of a sudden the mic gave terrible feedback, we would all have certain responses to that. Some of us would do this, like cover our ears, because that discordant sound is horrible to hear and horrible to endure. Some of us would probably look at the sound booth and be like, why aren't you doing something about that?

But generally it's not the sound person's fault, so don't blame them. It's a weird building, I'm just going to say that. But we all have responses, and the big thing is, make it stop.

And the truth is, when we are off kilter, when we have dissonance in our relationship with our appetites, we do the exact same thing. We end up going to extremes because we cannot live with the disorder. We cannot live with the dissonance.

And we're quick to act, and it's usually not in a very healthy way. Sometimes we do things like we just stuff it, do anything we can to dull the pain or the feeling. And this can be with things that are normally very healthy things, but are out of whack.

We could binge watch a TV show as avoidance. Like, I'm going to be real. I had some things happen this week that triggered some of the places that my hungers are disordered.

And I couldn't deal with it, so I spent six hours watching The Mandalorian. I'm like, that's kind of the things we do sometimes. Again, not a bad thing.

You've got to love our Star Wars and our baby Yodas. But at the same time, this is not a healthy response to something that's out of order. We do things like retail therapy or seeking comfort in another person's touch.

We do everything we can to remove ourselves from that feeling. We use other things to avoid and to dull this. Another way that we deal with this often is self-denial or extreme control or like self-flagellation and punishment.

We work so hard to get ourselves and this feeling under strict control so that it cannot, cannot bother us. My sister and I, there was a while where she was sucking her thumb quite a bit, and I was biting my fingernails. And my parents decided, we're going to deal with this.

It's going to be done. Our children are going to be okay. So they got this really nasty tasting stuff that you brush on people's fingers.

And then when you put them in your mouth, it just tastes horrible. My sister was the smart one, and she was not giving up sucking her thumb, so she dumped it out and filled it with water so that it wasn't actually nasty tasting. My parents caught on to that pretty quickly.

I, on the other hand, was like, nobody is stopping me from biting my nails. So I would hold my hands in my mouth to teach myself to be able to override the revulsion to that flavor. Because I could not deal otherwise.

And that's a thing. That's a bad thing when we're trying so hard to control our reactions to enable ourselves to still live in dysfunction. Because neither of these things are shalom.

It's not wholeness when we're stuffing ourselves full of something to hide the pain. And it's not wholeness when we're punishing ourselves or we're trying so hard to control our responses. Those aren't wholeness.

That's not restorative. That's not life-giving. And in many ways, it's something that's so isolating.

So instead of us being able to be fully integrated in our community, we're stepping back and hiding these parts of us that are disordered. So here, today is the first day of Lent. And as we walk into Lent as disciples of Jesus, we have an opportunity built in to the way the church works to examine our relationship with hunger or our appetites.

Why? Because our relationship with our appetites shapes who we become. It shapes how we see ourselves.

And it removes us further and further from who we were created to be. So let's go back. Let's look at Jesus in the wilderness.

And let's see what happens to him when he's confronted with hunger. So Jesus had just been called from this voice of heaven that he is the son of God, and he's prepping to step into ministry, but he's not there yet. So the spirit leads him into the desert, and he fasts for 40 days and 40 nights.

And then the tempter comes. And the tempter says this, If you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. The tempter is using Jesus' hunger to challenge his identity and the very thing that would be challenged over and over again in his ministry.

Let's look at what this would be for us. Let's pick our threadbare places. If you were a good enough mom, then.

If you were a real Christian, then. If you were smart enough, then. If you were really worth it, then.

If you had something worth saying, then. There are so many ways that our identity can be challenged. And it taps right in to the things that we are really hungry for.

How does Jesus respond to something so deep, so personal? He could have gone for the quick fix. He could have met the challenge from the tempter and been like, Go big or go home.

I am the son of God. Watch what I can do. But this is how he responds.

He says, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone. He responded in the way that acknowledges the need, his hunger. But then he brings shalom back into the equation.

He says, yes, I need bread to live. But what I need that is more than bread is the words from the mouth of God. Because in this moment, the Holy Spirit had been working in and through him.

And his identity was no longer a threadbare place. It was no longer a place of vulnerability. And the hunger, the hunger was in a right order.

The tempter wanted disorder and dissonance for Jesus. He wanted Jesus to give in to this physical hunger and the deeper hunger of proving he was who God says he was. But Jesus chose wholeness.

He chose harmony. He chose shalom about being real about his need and choosing to live in what God was calling him to be. Joining with God in the preparation and the journey and not forcing it.

So as disciples of Christ, especially now in this season of Lent, we can also enter into this space. We can enter into this wilderness and take a moment to be real about our appetites. Real about the places that we hunger.

And real about where those are off kilter. Where we're at extremes in either filling and stuffing it full or denial and self-control and self-punishment. We can see those places where our identity is being called into question.

Where do we need to know who we really are and whose we really are? And then in this place, we're invited to take a look at what we're being called to. Where is wholeness?

Where is restoration? Where is shalom? Where is harmony of right relationships?

Who is it that God wants you to become? And let's be real. Like sometimes examining these questions mean that we need to interrupt the regular flow of our lives.

Our patterns and our habits and we need to make room to listen. Sort of like going into the wilderness. And in some ways, this is where fasting comes in.

We can take this opportunity to choose something like what Christ chose on this journey into our symbolic wilderness. And interrupt the cycle and interrupt the cycle and hear things anew. We're invited to come here because God is about restoration.

He is about us being whole. God is about us being who we were meant to be. And shalom is waiting here.

And because Jesus went before and is walking with us. And because God is interested in who we are becoming and invested in us being fully who we were meant to be. We have space in this community and this time to be real and to let God restore.

So let's pray. God, as we come to this table today, and we're going to be taking your body and your blood in the cup and the bread. Let it be a place where we begin to come and be real about our hungers and our appetites.

Where we are in dissonance and where we need you to restore us. Let this time, this journey through Lent, draw us to be more like your son. And more like who you've called us to be.

Pray this in your name, Lord. Amen.