The forty days of Lent

 

 

I observed earlier that the season of Lent was forty days in duration.  This stretch of time excludes Sundays.  I’ll say more about that later.  But I want to say a thing or two about the time that the church assigns to Lent.

In its very early days the church devoted only Holy Week to the anticipation of Easter.  Over time the period came to be two weeks, then a month, and finally the church settled on the current duration.

There are a lot of connections to the number forty in the Bible.  God cleansed the earth with a flood that lasted forty days.  Israel wandered in the wilderness forty years in the period of the Exodus.  Moses was on Sinai forty days receiving The Law from God.  David reigned as King for forty years, as did Solomon.  Elijah fasted in the wilderness over a span of forty days.  Jesus’ fast and temptation took place over forty days.  The resurrected Christ appeared to his disciples in a forty-day span prior to The Ascension.  Finally, the Crucified Christ was in his tomb for forty hours.  It should not surprise us, then, that forty days became the duration of Lent.

When the number forty appears in scripture, there is also a sense of fulfillment.  Forty hours or forty days or forty years is “enough” time for the activity at hand.  Forty is sufficient.  It has a connotation of having contained all the time that was necessary to accomplish a given end.

Finally, forty days is roughly one-tenth of a year.  It is a tithe and therefore an appropriate time dedicated as a gift to God.

Yesterday the church began this cycle again.  I pray that we all find our sense of completeness over these forty days.

Ash Wednesday

 

Today is Ash Wednesday.  It is the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent.  The day gets its name from the historic Christian practice of retaining the palm branches that adorned the church sanctuary on the previous year’s Palm Sunday.  In making ready for Ash Wednesday the church burns the palms and then the priest/pastor applies the ashes in the shape of a cross to the foreheads of those who worship on that day.  Wearing ashes is a traditional sign of penitence. 

In the Bible persons frequently wore ashes as expressions of grief or penitence (2 Samuel 13, Job 42, Jeremiah 6, Daniel 9, Hebrews 9, Matthew 11 and Luke 10 among others). 

When Christian worshipers receive the imposition of ashes in worship, the presider usually says some form of Genesis 3:19, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."  The presider will often conclude with, “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

Because the date of Ash Wednesday depends on the timing of Easter, this observance moves around the calendar a bit.  It can fall anywhere between February 4 and March 10.

Ash Wednesday marks the commencement of the season of Lent.  These are the forty days immediately preceding Easter (excluding Sundays, which are reflections of Easter Day itself and are therefore inappropriate occasions for denial). 

Some folks erroneously teach that Lent is an extended period of “getting ready for Easter.”  Lawrence Hull Stookey reminds us that

Lent, until its final week, is a time of disciplined consideration of our life and death as transformed by our covenant with God and is closely related to the administration and reaffirmation of baptism at Easter.¹

This season is a kettle that sits on its own bottom.  It is related to – but independent of – our observance of Easter.

The liturgical color for the day (and season) is purple.  This is a solemn hue that represents penitence in the lives of Christians.

The liturgy for the day includes confession and absolution in preparation for the imposition of ashes.  Psalm 51 is a traditional expression of confession and many churches use this as part of their ritual for the day.

^{1 Lzwrence Hull Stookey, Calendar: Christ's Time for the Church}

^{(Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).}

Shrove Tuesday

 

Today is Shrove Tuesday in the Christian calendar.  Some people refer to the day as Mardi Gras (literally “Fat Tuesday”) – especially as they describe the carnivals of New Orleans and elsewhere.  It marks the last day before the beginning of Lent.  Since the date for the beginning of Lent depends on the timing of Easter, Shrove Tuesday also moves around the calendar and it can take place anywhere between February 3 and March 9 inclusive.

Shrove is a form of the verb shrive, which means “to obtain absolution for sins by way of confession and penitence.”  The day has a long history in the church.  Going back into the Middle Ages penitents would go to their confessors on this day in preparation for Lent.

It is a day in which households consumed fat – and all pleasant or indulgent foods in the house – as families made ready for the self-denial of Lent.  The tradition of eating pancakes on this day goes back to at least the seventeenth century.

It is a global holiday with a multitude of regional celebrations.  Christians observe the day in one form or another in almost all areas of the world.  Most area festivities carry a sense of a great party or fete prior to entering into the spirit of Lent. 

A Forty Day Lenten Reading Plan

The season of Lent is a time of deepening our Christian discipleship.  If a Christian wishes to enhance the life of faith, one of the practices that we undertake must surely be reading our Bibles.  John Wesley called it "Searching the Scriptures."  We can crack our Bibles open randomly and read a couple of verses, to be sure.  But that hardly qualifies as "searching."  Searching implies intentionality.  It also strongly suggests an organized approach to the task.

For the season of Lent, our churches are offering a "Forty Day Lenten Reading Plan."  During this season, this resource directs us to daily readings from the Gospel of Matthew.  Over the course of these forty days, the Reading Plan will move us through the entire book in manageable increments.

Besides helping us read the entire gospel, as our congregations use this resource we will be entering into this discipline together.  There is power in understanding that, as we read a section of scripture on a given day, that our family, friends, neighbors and fellow church-members will be centering their thoughts on the same passage.

I hope that you will make use of this offering, and that it is a blessing for you.  The Reading Plan will be available in your worship bulletins on Ash Wednesday, on Sunday, February 26 and here.

I pray that this will be a blessing for us all.

The peace of the Lord be with you.

It means "to ascribe worth"

Back when I was in seminary – and admittedly, that was so long ago that everything was in Latin – the North American church in general and The United Methodist church in particular were entering a time of change in the way we approached worship.  The worship renewal movement was an exciting period in our history.  Names like James F. White, Lawrence Hull Stookey and the Dean of worship voices in the UMC Hoyt Hickman were all publishing prolifically and producing resources that helped to change our liturgical landscape.

 It was a time of the emergence of the Common Lectionary.  That document has gone through several revisions, but the root work remains the bedrock of much of our worship practice to this day. 

 In those post-Vatican II days we moved altars out from the wall of the sanctuary, had the presider stand behind the Communion Table and face the congregation in a gesture of inclusion. 

 The hodgepodge of worship elements that stood as “Suggested Orders of Worship” in our Hymnal and Book of Worship gained reconsideration.  The General Conference of the church announced plans for a new Hymnal in its 1988 session and a new Book of Worship at its 1992 gathering.  The church quickly produced both of these volumes soon after each received approval.

 I believed in those days that we were living on the cutting edge of a movement that would truly transform The United Methodist Church and the Body of Christ for years to come.  It was an exciting, exhilarating, wonderful time.  I couldn’t wait to see what was coming next.

 I’m still waiting.

 Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, someone stomped on the brakes.  There have been few significant books or resources regarding United Methodist Worship – or worship in general – that I have been able to find in a good many years.  We accept as a given that worship must fall into one of three categories: traditional, contemporary, or blended.  Let’s be clear, in the face of liturgical renewal, the latter two groupings are more performance-driven than participatory for the “person in the pew” (or the auditorium seat).  Contemporary worship tends to mean choruses that contain between seven and nine words repeated over and over and over…

Everyone wears jeans and golf shirts.  Coffee from the expresso bar sits in the hand of many of the worshipers. And there is lots – LOTS – of emphasis on “feelings.”  (And if I hear one more prayer that repeats the phrase “we just” more than twice in a given prayer, I may go screaming into the night.)

 Blended worship tends toward the contemporary format but without the jeans and the cappuccino.  It is neither fish nor fowl, and the format frequently changes from week to week.  I don’t see this as a bad thing inherently, but moving from empty fluff to another version of empty fluff doesn’t reflect a lot of power.

If you go to our denominational bookstore website (Cokesbury) and enter "worship" in the search the whole first page consists of bulletins, hymnals, candles, ashes and then finally a couple of different versions of our official Book of Worship.  There are a lot of reprints and re-hashes of books that originate in the last century and one (1) serious volume that has a publishing date within the last two years.

I am not a curmudgeon who has lived too long, sitting in the corner and grumbling about the good ol’ days.  And, I don’t pretend to have sat in every single sanctuary/worship space in the country in order to experience each congregation’s worship first-hand.  What I do lament is the loss of focus by our church.  I am not going to spend time on the things that currently confuse the UMC.  I’ll do that some other day.  What I do want to observe upon is that I believe that our confusion and our lack of emphasis on quality worship have their beginnings in similar points in time.  When we lost our worship vision, we lost our way.

 A lot of people, when speaking about the work of the church, are quick to quote our United Methodist Mission Statement: "The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." (⁋120, Book of Discipline) That is well and good.  That is our mission.  That is what we do.  But it does not say who we are.  We leave that task to the UMC’s Articles of Religion.  These Articles, which date back to John Wesley, include Article XIII — Of the Church

The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men (sic) in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

Do you want to know who we say we are?  We are a worshiping community.  All that we are and all that we do grows out of our identity as worshipers of the One True God.  When we lose sight of this, when we cease to meditate and consider and debate and improve upon our worship lives, we quickly stagnate.  What follows is division, disruption and irrelevance. 

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of      his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they   covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to        another and said:

'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory!'

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’

-- Isaiah 6

I believe that is where we start.