Teaching for Life - What is Lent?

As an update to our weekly schedule this week, in observance of Ash Wednesday, we will not have our normal weekly Youth Meeting, we will instead meet with the full church body in the sanctuary.

In order to help prepare us for Lent, and Ash Wednesday, I will use this blog to post information and teaching on the background of these observances.

Today's post is from an informative Devotional prepared by Pastor Faron. If you have any questions or comments, please post them and I will answer them here since it might be of benefit to someone else as well, it could be that someone else has the same question.

For points, please just read the entire posting and them post a comment certifying that you have read it.

In Christ,
Wes

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While I would like to be able to tell you to turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 21 verse 4 to find the beginning of Lent described by Saint Luke, I can not. While there are Biblical events that contributed to its practice, Lent is not in the Bible. Some scholars argue that it is a practice that dates back to the Apostles, but the earliest evidence we have regarding the preparatory fasting before Easter comes from the third century Anno Domini and for the Lenten season as a regularized church practice from the fourth century.

Simply put Lent is a season of penitence, fasting and prayer designed to purify and prepare our hearts to receive the resurrected Christ at Easter. In the early church catechumens, those desiring to be Christians, would go through a preparatory period of instruction and purification that would end with their baptism on Easter morning. While this practice was reserved for new Christians, the church recognized that we all needed to prepare our hearts for Easter and so from early a period of prayer and fasting before Easter was practiced. The traditions of this preparatory fast differed in the eastern and western parts of the church and continue to be different today, just as the Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrate Easter at a different time than the western church. Since our Protestant tradition is rooted in the Western Church we will focus on that history for our understanding of Lent.

The length of the fast and the extent of the fast varied. Some of the early fasts lasted a few hours, others a few days; the regular practice of the Lenten fast being forty days seems to have been established prior to the Council of Nicea in 313 A.D. Gregory the Great in the sixth century established the modern understanding of Lent beginning on Ash Wednesday and continuing through Holy Saturday. The season is six weeks of six fast days, Monday through Saturday, plus the Wednesday through Saturday of Ash Wednesday week to bring us to a total of forty fasting days. Sundays are considered feast days, as each Sunday is a mini Easter where we celebrate our resurrected Lord. Gregory is also the person who began the tradition of imposing ashes on peoples’ foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

The extent of the Lenten fast was very strict in the beginning, allowing for one meal a day around the three o’clock hour and requiring those fasting to give up meat, dairy, eggs and oil. It was the giving up of eggs and oil that led to the traditions of Christians giving eggs at Easter and of having pancakes on Fat Tuesday. Exactly what people gave up varied by area and over time, but ultimately the strictness was relaxed to the modern practice of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday being the only strict fast days and meat only being given up on Fridays during Lent.

A final modern practice of Lent has been for individuals to give up something of importance to them. The purpose of this practice is the same as a fast, to demonstrate to both oneself and to God that God has a higher priority in our lives than the thing which we give up and to realize that we depend on God to meet our needs. Too often when we feel lonely, angry, or even stressed we turn to things other than God to cope with these feelings. We might eat chocolate, smoke, drink wine or go shopping. When we give up these coping mechanisms or even something that just consumes a lot of our time we soon discover that God is fully capable of meeting our coping needs and that we can fully place our trust in Him.

Lent is a season in the Church Calendar designed for us to prepare our hearts to fully receive the resurrected Christ at Easter. Through Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection God the Father reconciled the whole world to Him restoring a brokenness that has existed from the Garden. As Christians, we must fully trust in this saving act to reconcile our relationships to God. Lent is a time to condition the soil of hearts to receive this truth for the first time or to renew this truth each year as we prepare to receive anew the miracle that is the Resurrected Christ.

This devotional has been written to create a shared journey for us this Lenten season. It will incorporate scripture, teaching, prayer, praise and spiritual discipline challenges so that we might have a shared practice and focus as we prepare our hearts. The focus of our study will be Saint Peter who is perhaps the New Testament person who is in greatest need of God’s grace. His bold heart had to be humbled and transformed so that he could lead the Church in a boldly humble way. He knew faith, fear and failure, but he was always ready to act whether it was stepping out of a boat or telling a lame man to stand. Peter’s encounter with Jesus Christ completely transformed his life and because of that Christ built His Church upon him and all of us stand here today following Christ. May our shared Lenten study transform our hearts in the same way that Peter’s was to enable us to build upon his faith to continue transforming the world.