Friends, for the first time in weeks, I wrote this sermon without wondering whether or not we were going to have to cancel in-person church service. It has not been an easy winter and I know we are all looking for signs of spring in the air. We are waiting for the ground to thaw. I always feel like I see the light at the end of the tunnel when pitchers and catchers report. So my mind has been drifting towards dreams of ballpark hotdogs, but as a reminder that we don’t always get we want, but sometimes what we need, this week in the liturgical calendar of two religious traditions, we enter a season of fasting. This Wednesday marks the beginning of the Muslim observance of Ramadan, as well as Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian liturgical season of Lent. They are very different observances, of course. Ramadan, which honors the revelation of the Quran and all holy scripture, has a more celebratory nature, with communal pre-dawn and evening meals bookmarking the daily fasts. Lent, the 40 days in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter is more solemn, focused on prayer, sacrifice, and almsgiving as observers prepare their hearts to hear the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But both call for practices of self-reflection, fasting and restraint. Both ask observers to give something up in order to make room for the holy.
As an atheist teenager, I was terribly judgy of my friends who observed Lent. The giving up of sugar and junk food felt like a way to reinforce diet culture and cloak it in piety, which was an affront to my feminist values. I am embarrassed now to remember how, full of teenage bravado and scorn, I declared, “I don’t think Jesus cares if you drink diet coke.” As I matured and my relationship with religion changed, I discovered Lenten traditions that weren’t based on sacrifice. Lent became a season for focusing on practices that brought me closer to the sacred and sometimes those practices can be additive; for example, a new spiritual practice, a new book of devotional readings, doing one act of justice/resistance a day, posting an inspirational photo or quote on social media daily, etc.
This made me more comfortable with the season for a while, but this year, I’m not sure comfort should be the goal. I don’t know about you, but I could use some help figuring out how to give things up. Because I can think of so many recent examples of when I’ve refused to sacrifice my comfort for the collective good. The Amazon boycotts that lasted until an “emergency” requiring overnight delivery. The Disney+ boycott that lasted until my desire to see the Taylor Swift eras tour documentary won out. The single use plastics, and red meat, and international flights that are increasing carbon emissions. And heck, forget the collective good for a minute, there are so many times where I’ve refused to give something up for my own good. Scrolling on facebook and instagram even when I can feel it ruining my attention span, making me angry, dissatisfied, and numb to name just one example.
We humans are not good at giving things up. We are not good at choosing discomfort and inconvenience, even when it might be in our best interest. We are hard-wired to want to have our cake and eat it too. Ask any minister what church attendance is like on Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday or Good Friday versus Easter morning. We want the joy of resurrection and new life without the loss and death. We want the health benefits of meditation without the hard hours of practice and boredom and learning proper posture. We want the solace of community without the discomfort of conflict. We want better schools but we don’t want to pay higher taxes. We want to save the earth, but at the end of the day, aren’t we all kind of hoping someone invents a machine that will magically reverse climate change without us having to drink out of paper straws?
But friends, the stakes these days are too high to rely on magical thinking. The truth is, living our values, really putting our faith into action, might mean giving things up. It might mean sacrificing some temporary comfort, and abandoning old habits and old ways of living that aren’t centered on love, that don’t serve our neighbor or our planet, that don’t serve collective liberation. Shopping habits that exploit workers, convenience products that destroy the earth, tech platforms that threaten democracy and further enrich the powerful.
This is what feminist eco-theologian Sally McFague argued. Towards the end of her life, McFague made a move unusual for a liberal theologian. She began writing passionately about the Christian concept of “kenosis,” or self-emptying. The act of letting go of ego and power and like Jesus committing to acts of self-sacrificial love. You don’t hear a lot of feminist theologians talk about self-sacrifice. For good reason! But McFague cared deeply about creation care and economic inequality and she worried our habits of overconsumption were killing one another and the earth. The only way forward was to practice radical restraint and humility. To give things up. McFague writes, “This ‘crisis’ has to do with how we live on a daily basis—the food we eat, the transportation we use, the size of the house we live in, the consumer goods we buy, the luxuries we allow ourselves, the amount of long-distance air travel we permit ourselves, and so forth. The enemy is the very ordinary life we ourselves are leading as well-off North Americans.” The kenotic paradigm, she says…includes the recognition that life’s flourishing on earth demands certain limitations and sacrifices at physical and emotional levels. The realities of our time mean that the vocabulary and sensibility of self-limitation, egolessness, sharing, giving space to others, and limiting our energy use no longer sound like a special language for the saints, but rather, like an ethic for all of us.” Pope Francis echoed this call in his 2019 Ash Wednesday address when he said, “We need to free ourselves from the clutches of consumerism and the snares of selfishness, from always wanting more, from never being satisfied, and from a heart closed to the needs of the poor,”
I hear them. I do. But then I remember my many failed attempts at an Amazon boycott. It’s hard! Our brains can be frighteningly simple sometimes, wired to desire instant gratification and to avoid discomfort. Sometimes self-denial feels like trying to overcome our very nature.
But this, this is what religion is good for. Some scholars say all theology is really anthropology. Religious traditions understand the best and worst of human nature and offer us stories and tools and frameworks for dealing with all the limits and possibilities of our humanness. There are ancient spiritual technologies that help us grapple with the idea that sometimes we need to let go of something, go without, give something up for our own good or for the good of our shared life together. Observances like Lent and Ramadan that give us a chance to practice this hard work. Now, I know these practices have caused a lot of harm for folks, and I do not want anyone to engage in a practice that might be physically or emotionally damaging. If you remember from our second reading, a fast can take many forms that aren’t just about food. So my goal isn’t to convince you to observe fast or ramadan, but to contemplate some of the ways these practices can be informative or instructive as we figure out how to live our lives in ways that lead to collective flourishing.
And there are three things about these practices that I want to lift up. First, they remind us, in Omid Safi’s words, that “Our Bodies Are Means by Which We Live Out Our Faith.” There is a materiality—and embodied quality to both Lent and Ramadan that reminds us that our bodies and souls are deeply connected. We can’t just think our faith, we have to live it, in the real world with the flesh and bones and earthy resources we’ve been given. Fasting or giving something up for 40 days helps remind us of the agency and power we have to express our faith in tangible, embodied ways. We might think it’s silly when our friends give up diet coke or chocolate for Lent, but that practice serves as a reminder that what we consume, when, and how is an expression of our faith values. These practices help strengthen that soul, body connection for us. They create short cuts in our brain that remind us that what we eat and how we travel and where we spend our money and how we spend our time are not disconnected from what we hold most sacred.
Second, these practices bring us deeper into community. They remind us we don’t and can’t do this alone. Whether it’s reducing our consumption and changing our habits to combat climate change, boycotting a business that’s supporting harmful policies, or better distributing our wealth and resources to care for the least of these, it’s going to take a critical mass to be successful. One person reducing single use plastics or refusing to shop at Target until they stop cooperating with ICE won’t have much of an impact. We need all of us. Lent and Ramadan invite us to practice fasting as a communal endeavor. We enter these seasons knowing generations of ancestors have already tread these spiritual paths. We know we have companions for the journey to hold us accountable and provide us encouragement, and we get to remember that the feast is that much more delicious when we’ve shared in the fast together. I love Omid Safi’s warm memory of his Arabic professor taking a group of students to Waffle House for the pre-dawn meal. The experience of living our embodied faith collectively is powerful.
And finally, and most importantly, these observances help reframe practices of self-restraint or sacrifice, seeing them not as pious acts of willpower done for their own sake, but as steps towards greater joy and wholeness. Sally McFague writes that we are called to “restraint, not for the sake of ascetic denial of the world, but in order that “abundant life” might be possible for all.” The work of achieving abundant life for all should be joyful work! If we’re going to stick in the fights for justice and equity for the long haul, we need to find pleasure and meaning in making decisions that serve our neighbor and care for the earth.
Ramadan and Lent remind us that there can be joy, richness, and spiritual fruits in practices of restraint. After all, Lent comes from an Old English word meaning “spring season.” It ends on Easter, with the promise of resurrection, of new and abundant life. Ramadan is a celebratory month, with each day’s fast ending in an iftar, a communal meal. Many people who celebrate these sacred practices will tell you that what is gained is far more than was given up. A deeper relationship with God or the sacred, a better understanding of what’s most important in their lives, a new sense of spaciousness when they let go of something that is no longer serving them.
Ramadan and Lent are reminders that restraint, denial, and sacrifice do not always look like loss. They are reminders that sometimes in giving something up, we can gain something more beautiful, more lasting, more worthwhile, more holy. And I don’t know about you, but I need those reminders. Because they will help give me the courage to let go of things that are no longer serving me, to give up the things that are no longer serving my community or the planet, even when it’s hard and uncomfortable and inconvenient.
During this season of fasting, this season of embodied, communal, joyful, faithful restraint, may we, in the words of Walter Bruggemenn, find ways to depart from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, depart from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And arrive in a new neighborhood.
May it be so. Amen.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
