Randy Booth is the Pastor of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, a fellow CREC member church in Nacogdoches, TX.  Last year he provided some useful resources on celebrating Lent that I thought good to pass on to my dear readers.

For family devotions he provided Lenten Meditations and Prayers – which I printed and hope to use this year.

He provides some general background to the liturgical calendar in his post: The Church Calendar

We keep track of time and seasons of the year by using calendars that provide us opportunities to observe, commemorate, and celebrate certain events or occasions. The changing seasons of the year also provide us with recurring opportunities to celebrate the Christian Faith in worship. The Christian church, following earlier Jewish tradition, has long used the seasons of the year as an opportunity for festivals and holidays, sacred time set aside to worship God as the Lord of life.

While Jewish celebration revolves around the Exodus from Egypt, the Christian Church year focuses on the life and ministry of Jesus. The sequence of festivals from Advent to Resurrection Sunday becomes an annual spiritual journey for worshippers as they kneel at the manger, listen on a hillside, walk the streets of Jerusalem, hear the roar of the mob, stand beneath the cross, and witness the resurrection! The rest of the church year provides opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the coming of Jesus and his commission to His people to be a light to the world.

The Christian calendar is organized around two major centers of Sacred Time: Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany; and Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, concluding at Pentecost. The rest of the year following Pentecost is known as Ordinary Time, from the word “ordinal,” which simply means counted time (First Sunday after Pentecost, etc.). Ordinary Time is used to focus on the various other aspects of the Faith.

And here he give some explanation of the use of colors in the historic church liturgical practice: Church Colors

Since fabrics have to be some color or the other, the historic Church has taken advantage of this fact and has used color to set the theme of worship. A consensus has developed about the use of colors in the western Church: green, purple, white, and red.

Green Green is the default color. Green is the color of vegetation, therefore it is the color of life. Green is the color for the Season of Epiphany and the Season after Pentecost. These two seasons are also called “Ordinary Time” because the Sundays have no names, just ordinal numbers.

Purple In antiquity, purple dye was very expensive, so purple came to signify wealth, power, and royalty. Therefore purple is the color for the seasons of Advent and Lent, which celebrate the coming of the King. Since as Christians we prepare for our King through reflection and repentance, purple has also become a penitential color.

White Angels announced Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8-15) and His Resurrection (Luke 24:1-8). The New Testament consistently uses white to describe angels and the risen Lord (see Matthew 17:2 and 28:3, Mark 9:3 and 16:5, John 20:12, Acts 1:10, and throughout Revelation.) In the ancient Church, people were given white robes as soon as they emerged from the waters of baptism. Therefore, white is the color for the seasons of Easter and Christmas. White is the color for funerals, since it is the color of the Resurrection, for weddings, regardless of the season.

Red Red is the color for Pentecost Sunday and for ordinations and installations, because it is the color of fire and therefore also of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2:3).

In Western Christianity Lent begins on Ash Wednesday (March 9, 2011) and concludes on Holy Saturday (April 23, 2011). The six Sundays in Lent are not counted among the forty days of lent because each Sunday represents a “mini-Easter”, a celebration of Jesus’ victory over sin and death.

Our church will have an Ash Wednesday service, which I look forward to each year because the readings and songs are all based on the seven Penitential Psalms.

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Tags: Church Calendar, family worship, Lent, Randy Booth

Today (03/29/09) Dennis Tuuri, Pastor of RCC, in a sermon related to Lent and Christian suffering, mentioned that “fasting is an anticipation of a change in history.” This is a very helpful perspective to keep in mind as people consider the meaning and use of both Lent and fasting generally. Isaiah 58:3, 5 tells us that fasting is an affliction of our souls. Properly understood, fasting, when practiced, should be seen as part of our praying that God would use us to change the world around us. Specifically, in Isaiah 58:6-7 we are told about fasting that pleases the Lord:

“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, And not hide yourself from your own flesh?”

It is the kind of fasting that moves us to action and service. In our service we see the world transformed around us. The future we hope for is brought into the present. Fasting brings us into conformity to the will of God so that we become part of the establishment of His Kingdom.

Tags: Dennis Tuuri, Fasting, future, Lent, OT - Isaiah, service

This is a communion homily I gave on March 22,2009:

This is the season of Lent.  We at RCC don’t emphasize or do much to practice Lent, but the 40 days of Lent is a reminder of other 40 day events in scripture, not the least of which is the 40 days our Savior spent in the wilderness after His baptism.

In the gospel accounts of His baptism by John (which is Christ’s appointment by God as the warrior priest, prophet and king), Matthew says the Spirit descended on Him like a dove and the Father commended Him from Heaven, and then,

Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. (4:1-2)

Mark says,

12 Immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. 13 And He was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and was with the wild beasts…

And Luke says,

1 Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry.

The very first thing Jesus did following His baptism was to do battle with the Devil. It was the Spirit who filled Him and led Him into this battle. He is our Spirit-empowered deliverer par excellence. When He finished the skirmish in the wilderness the Gospels say that the Devil left Him and angels came and ministered to Him. Presumably by giving Him food and rest. But that was just the beginning. Luke said that He went by the power of the Spirit to Galilee and began His public ministry, preaching about the coming of the kingdom and doing works that brought it forth in the world. Peter Leithart wrote:

The Spirit is the Warrior Spirit.  He clothes Othniel and Gideon, Jephthah and Samson and Saul, and trains their hands to fight.  He descends on Jesus like a dove, and then drives Him to the wilderness to battle Satan in the howling waste.  By the Spirit, Jesus heals.  By the Spirit, He casts out demons.  By the Spirit, He cleanses lepers.  By the Spirit, He topples Satan’s kingdom.  By the Spirit, He binds the strong man and plunders his house.

He is our example, for after the first Christian Pentecost, we too are Spirit-empowered deliverers. Again Peter Leithart:

The Warrior Spirit falls on the disciples, and Peter boldly calls the Jews to repentance for crucifying the Prince of Life.  The Spirit makes war against the flesh, as the flesh wars against the Spirit, but the Spirit will be the victor.  It’s only through the Spirit that we can trample Satan underfoot.  By Him, we put on the armor of God to fight principalities and powers and wickedness in high places.  The Spirit is a sword that circumcises hearts rather than flesh, and the word is the sword of the Spirit that divides soul and spirit, joints and marrow.  The Warrior Spirit stirs our spirits, filling us with battle rage, with holy blood wrath.  By the Spirit, each of us become one of God’s beserkers, [driven with] the zeal of Jesus.

After we are baptized we are filled with the Spirit and led into battle with the world, the flesh and the devil. We become hungry and weakened in the battle, and God invites us to this table to renew our strength so that we can rise up again for Kingdom work. Interestingly, the section in 1 Corinthians that deals with Paul’s instructions to the Church about the Lord’s Supper is followed immediately with a discussion of the gifts given by the Holy Spirit to believers enabling us to be His ministers of Christ in this world. We are His Spirit-empowered deliverers.

Tags: Holy Spirit, Lent, Peter Leithart

This is a fascinating article written by Peter Leithart:

Keep the Fast, Keep the Feast

In the article Peter provides some excellent theological background for properly understanding fasting and Lent.  Lent and it’s propoer use has been the subject of much discussion recently amoung some of the CREC pastors. I think his insights are very useful to recovering a biblical and a modern Protestant understanding of the Lenten season.

Tags: Fasting, feasting, Lent, worship