"We must fast": Andrewes on our need of Lent

As our times are there is more need to speak for fasting than against hypocrisy - from Lancelot Andrewes's  Ash Wednesday sermon, 1622, preached before the King at Whitehall.

Andrewes again returns to the subject of the Lenten fast in his Ash Wednesday sermons of 1622 and 1623. 

In 1622, he commenced by summarising the previous year's sermon, "Our last year's endeavours":

we omit not to fast. Not at other times; but not at this specially, when the Church, or rather God by the Church, her ancient order and custom calls us to it.

He then addresses the text he has chosen from the Gospel appointed for the First Day of Lent, Moreover when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites. The accusation that fasting is inextricably bound up with hypocrisy he describes as belonging to the "policies of Satan":

And will you see how compendious a way he deviseth to rid us clean of all hypocrisy? Thus: to keep no Lent, not to fast at all; and so he will warrant us we shall be sure to be clear from being any hypocrites. So to avoid hypocrisy he voids fasting quite.

Associated with this is the fear that fasting was an expression of Popery: 

As now in place of 'be not like hypocrites,' is come a fear of 'be not like Papists;' we shall be like Papists if we do. And not to fast is made a supersedeas [i.e. a writ of suspension] to all Popery, as if that alone were enough to make us truly Reformed. This is all our fear now.

Against this, Andrewes emphasises that the call to fast is given by the Lord to His Apostles, and it is then a practice which cannot be abandoned by Christians:

these words being directed by Christ and by Him spoken to His disciples, by the grace of God all be not hypocrites or superstitious that fast, for Christ's Disciples were neither. We must fast then like Christ's Disciples; we may be of their number. And indeed the truth is, Christ's Disciples are only truly seized of it. Hypocrites do but encroach upon it, or rather on the outside of it, as doth the wolf upon the sheep's clothing. But neither is the sheep to leave or lay down his fleece, nor the Christian man his fast, because otherwhile the wolf is found in the one, or the hypocrite at the other.

In 1623, again - as with each of these Ash Wednesday sermons - preaching before the King, Andrewes pointed to the relationship between fasting and repentance:

To speak of repentance at the time of fasting, or of fasting at the time of repentance, is no way out of season; as tree and fruit they stand. Of these fruits, fasting is one. And this we now begin, a worthy fruit, even from year to year religiously brought forth in the Church of Christ.

Pointing to Scriptural examples, he says of repentance and fasting, "They go always together". This is why the Church's penitential season is a fast:

Which has ever since from year to year been religiously observed, both as a time of public penance, and as a time of general abstinence in the Church of Christ, convenient for the time of fast.

It is fasting which prepares us for and orients us towards repentance:

This medicine is to be taken fasting, as the rules of physic are, and as medicines use to be. Men come neither eating nor drinking to take physic; when we will take that, we take nothing else. Thus fasting is a friend to physic both of soul and body. When we repent, no man will advise us to do it upon a full stomach.

The absence of fasting leads to a "fruitless, formal, slight kind of repentance".  Against such a shadow of repentance, Andrewes ends the sermon by reiterating the relationship between "this time" of fasting and repentance:

We shall be sure to fly the 'wrath to come.' Nay it shall fly from us, by us, or over us, but from us sure wrath shall fly; and instead of it the 'kingdom of heaven' will come near to us and we to it. For 'repent' and 'it is at hand,' say St. John and Christ both. It is our daily prayer it may come, and this is the way to make it come. What shall I say? We shall sanctify thereby this time of fast, and as it has ever been counted, make it a holy time; and we in it shall have 'our fruit in holiness, and the end everlasting life.'
  
Andrewes's Ash Wednesday sermons are a robust and confident presentation of the retention of the Lenten fast by the reformed ecclesia Anglicana.  As a body of teaching, they expound the Scriptural case both for the discipline of fasting and the particular practice of the Lenten fast.  A recurring theme is Andrewes's concern that rejecting the Lenten fast undermines both fasting and penitence.  He recognises that in the absence of a season given over to penitential fasting, it will too easily be the case that both will be neglected in the Church's life. 

For contemporary Anglicans seeking to renew the discipline of Lent, the sermons of Andrewes are a rich resource, setting before us the gift and call of the Lenten fast, and our profound need of it.