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LENTEN DEVOTIONALS
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Covenant
Why Musings?
- The Musings Page will be a place to consider thought-provoking, evocative, sometimes polemical but not overtly political, writings, quotes, ideas, and poetry on the Christian life in all its facets: spiritual, religious, ethical, and practical.
Lagniappe
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A is for Alleluia
posted on February 28, 2012 by Musings
An excerpt from : From: On Being – A is for Alleluia
A is for Ashes and last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the day when many denominations observe the beginning of Lent — the 40-ish days leading up to the Last Supper, the death of Jesus, the finding of the empty tomb, and the mysterious appearances of Jesus….
…….Last Tuesday, eating pancakes and lemons, some friends discussed what to give up. We were all agreed: Lent is less for giving up, and more for making space……
We make space to contemplate what it is that we will celebrate in 40 days’ time. We make space to recognise our faults. We pray a little more. We allow our emptier stomachs to remind us of the pithiness of our observations in comparison with real hunger. We give more money. We confess. We reconcile. We listen to emptiness for a while. We do not say Alleluia.
Pádraig Ó Tuama originally from Cork, works in Belfast, Northern Ireland doing chaplaincy and community work, mostly through the Corrymeela Community and the Irish Peace Centres. Part of his community work involves writing poetry to encapsulate some of the stories of living and dying in the context of the Irish conflict.
On Being is a public radio project delving into the human side of news stories + issues.
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Filed under: Lent
Lent: Dying to Yourself
posted on February 20, 2012 by Musings
The Mardi Gras season is drawing to a close and we are approaching the season of Lent on Wednesday. In the link below to a short video clip author and historian Diana Butler Bass talks about the various ways she has considered dying to herself. This is a Lenten concept that places sacrifice at the most difficult intersections of our lives, the places that are hard to let go of and the “things” that we don’t want to or can’t seem to part with. It exposes our pride and self-centeredness, rather than our God-centeredness.
Video clip: Lent and Dying to Yourself
This video clip is from a subscription to The Work of the People, which is a community of artists who create visual media for the church to re-orient God’s people around Jesus’ good news and mission to make all things new.
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Our Reformed Heritage and Lent
posted on February 18, 2012 by Musings
As Presbyterians, we are relative new-comers to celebrating the liturgical seasons of the church year, including the season of Lent. Musings this month will be looking at Lent, its history and purpose, and at Lenten spiritual disciplines in particular.
To get us started, we are considering an article Yes and No: Lent and the Reformed Faith Today by John D. Witvliet from the website of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. It is a brief history of Lent in the reformed churches. Excerpts are below. At the end of the article, Witvliet asks the following questions, which are good food for thought.
- What kind of worship service do you associate with Lent? Is it any different than worship at any other time of year?
- What do you think about using spiritual disciplines during Lent, such as fasting or other means of giving something up?
- How does self-denial and self-giving love tie into preparation for baptism or remembrance of your baptism?
- Is it a good idea to “adopt Lent as an identifiable season of preparation for Easter”? Why or why not?
- How can we put Jesus at the center of how we mark time?
Excerpts from Yes and No: Lent and the Reformed Faith Today
Our Recent Practice
For the past three generations, Christian Reformed congregations have typically been warm to sermon series on Jesus’ suffering and death, rather cool to too much emphasis on spiritual disciplines including fasting and prayer, and downright cold to other traditions that grew up around Lent: Mardi Gras parties, fish on Fridays, and setting aside the word “Alleluia” during Lenten worship (until Easter morning). This is why, for example, the 1987 Psalter Hymnal’s section on Lent focuses almost exclusively on Jesus’ suffering and death.
Fourth-Century Innovation – A link between baptism and Lent emerged
…..But that created a challenge: How was the church supposed to ensure that people who wanted to be baptized were serious about Jesus? And what did the church need to do to shape these new Christian lives? ……
So the church developed a 40-day course of preparation for baptism—a time of Bible study, catechism study (that’s right—catechism study 1,200 years before John Calvin), and spiritual disciplines including prayer and fasting. This was a super-charged “40-day spiritual adventure” or “40 days of purpose” (both are modern riffs on an ancient idea). The idea was that during those 40 days believers should be either preparing for their own baptism or encouraging someone who was preparing for baptism…….
In other words, Lent was developed in what we now call a “missional context.” It was a pastoral innovation for a time much like our own, where vast numbers of people do not grow up in the church. Lent was the church’s way of saying yes to the free offer of salvation and no to cheap grace—baptism without discipleship.
16th-Century Reform
By the time John Calvin came along, the memory of Lent as a season for shaping new Christians had long faded. Adult baptisms were rare. Just about everyone was baptized as an infant. The Lenten disciplines were still practiced, but they were often imposed by the church in a distorted way as a means of currying favor with God.
So Calvin said yes to the practice he felt his people needed—teaching built around the catechism. But he said no to the season of Lent as too hopelessly superstitious to be of help to his people.
What’s Best Today?
In places where Lent is associated almost exclusively with legalism or superstition, Reformed Christians would be wise to follow Calvin’s lead and say no to Lent. Instead, perhaps pastors should lead congregations through reflections on the theme of “freedom in Christ.”
In other contexts there may be great wisdom in adopting Lent as an identifiable season of preparation for Easter. All of us need to sanctify our calendars and make clear that nothing in the winter and springtime of the year—not Valentine’s Day, not spring break, not March Madness, not even the hockey playoffs—is as important to our identity as Jesus’ death and resurrection………
May God’s Spirit equip us with all “love and spiritual knowledge to discern what is best” (Phil. 1:10).
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ExtraOrdinary Time
posted on February 4, 2012 by Musings
We are in one of two periods of the church liturgical year known as Ordinary Time. The first Ordinary Time falls between Epiphany and Lent. Ordinary Time is when we live our lives together as a church, with Christ walking amongst us. The lectionary features stories of Jesus teaching and healing and feeding and tending his flock.
In the spirit of Ordinary Time, we are providing links to some collective blogs, individual blogs, on-line magazines, and other resources that challenge, inspire, make us think and sustain us. We will post some more links in a few days and we have other blogs listed on Our Blogs We Follow panel on the left hand side of the page. Check those out as well. And please share the places that you have come across that provide food for your journey.
• Gathering Voices from The Thoughtful Christian
A place you come to learn more about spirituality, ministry, popular culture, engaging news stories, and find out how these everyday stories can become a part of your religious life.
• Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice
An online journal and community that examines, expresses, and provokes social justice as inspired by the prophetic gospel of Jesus Christ. As both a journal and a forum for conversation, action and community building, Unbound is at once the inheritor of the print journal Church & Society (98 years running) and the innovator of an interactive approach to supporting social ministry.
Patheos.com is the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality and to explore and experience the world’s beliefs. Patheos brings together faith communities, academics, and the broader public into a single environment, and is the place where many people turn on a regular basis for insight, inspiration, and stimulating discussion.
Progressive Christian and Evangelical are two great portals full of diverse blogs on where our Christian faith and life intersect.
There are a rich diversity of voices in other portals featuring blogs from the Atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, and Pagan communities.
A blog of the Environmental Ministries Office of the PC(USA). It includes a wide array of environmental topics: upcoming environmental events, links to interesting articles and studies, information on environmental advocacy, eco-theology topics, and success stories from churches that are going “green.”
