One of the great gifts of my year has been the experience I've had teaching a class about the Old Testament to the leaders of the Sudanese American community here in Phoenix. These are a people who know what it is to fast, to suffer because of other people's anger and hatred.
It was in helping them think through why God insists so strongly that we obey the Law that I worked my own way through the ideas in this week's sermon. We fast because fasting takes us outside of ourselves, and makes us realize that we are not able to live by ourselves alone. We are part of the one body.
The sermon ends with some thoughts about how we might best make sense of the unimaginable tragedy playing out before right now in Japan.
